• Intro

    Before you unplug, ask these 4 questions.

    More and more often, mental health professionals, religious leaders, educators and even tech professionals are exhorting us to "unplug" — to disconnect from the Internet and our beloved devices on a regular basis. But the more we're pushed to unplug, the more we need to ask some very fundamental questions about this newly trendy exhortation. Here are four questions we should ask of any article or expert who's urging us to disconnect:

  • Problem to address

    What’s the problem we’re trying to address by unplugging?


    Distraction. Addiction. Compulsion. A constant craving for attention.


    Whatever your tech-related problem, someone will tell you that the solution is to simply unplug. In this respect, the off switch resembles nothing so much as the humble leech, long used as a go-to treatment for a mind-boggling assortment of maladies.


  • “The basis for the widespread use of leeches in medicine stems from the idea that all diseases are caused by tainted or impure blood that has to be removed from the body,” Margaret Modig recounts in The Strange Lore of Leeches. It would seem we make a similar error when it comes to the psychological and cognitive problems of contemporary life.

  • As Ian Marcus Corbin writes in Time To Log Off,  “It goes without saying — everyone knows it now, even if they can't say why — that things like social media are bad for us, that many of us are clinically addicted to our phones, that life online brings out the worst in many, and probably in most of us.”

  • Resnick

    But we’re well within our rights to ask for a more precise diagnosis before submitting to the surgical removal of our devices, particularly since the relationship between digital causes and human effects is still so murky. “With only observational data, and no experimental controls, it is notoriously difficult to make causal inferences,” Resnick et al. write in What Social Media Data We Are Missing and How to Get It

    “For example, if we observe a positive correlation between posting frequency an...

  • Opportunity costs


    What else would we (or our kids) do with this time?


    Listen to the unplugging evangelists, and you’d be forgiven for thinking that all that stands between you and a day full of meaningful, enriching activity is the evil, seductive phone in your pocket.  Writing about the time he spends with his grandchildren, In his column for American Libraries, Will Manley writes that “I endure the inevitable screams of protest when I snatch their iPads, turn off the high-def big screen TV, and hide the vide...

  • Liebowitz Zentner

    If anything, our time online may be displacing less productive activities: In Clash of the Titans: Does Internet Use Reduce Television Viewing, Stan J. Liebowitz and Alejandro Zentner found that  “the Internet has reduced television viewing for individuals with Internet connections”, particularly for those “who have grown up since the personal computer was developed.” Whether that online time represents a better choice than an hour of TV depends on what you’d be watching, of course — but it als...

  • As Longley and Singleton write in Linking Social Deprivation and Digital Exclusion in England, “There is increasing awareness that the failure of individuals, households and communities to engage with new information communications technologies has negative consequences in both the private (for example, purchasing behaviour) and public (for example, accessing services) domains.”

  • By mapping data from a national Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD) against data classifying information and communications technology (ICT) usage, the authors were able to conclude that “nation-wide patterns of digital exclusion and material deprivation are linked, and that high levels of material deprivation are generally associated with low levels of engagement with ICTs and vice versa”.


    When there is so much research showing the negative economic and social impact of digital exclusion,  it ...

  • In Revisiting the Digital Divide in the Context of a ‘Flattening’ World, Deepak Prem Subamony notes that “social/economic/cultural groups that find themselves on the right side of the Digital Divide - namely, those who comprise the technological haves-knowers-doers – can be seen as largely oblivious beneficiaries of a vast matrix of privileges”. Precisely because we are awash in the many benefits of ubiquitous technology, we have the luxury of underestimating the cost of switching off.


    But it’...

  • Downsides of unplugging


    How does unplugging help prepare us for our daily lives in a digital world?


    Of all the mysteries around the current vogue for unplugging, nothing mystifies me more than how it’s supposed to help us live in this actual reality —  you know, the world in which most of us depend on our devices for little things like work, food and transportation.

  • In Comte Unplugged: Using a "Technology Fast" to Teach Sociological Theory, Katrina C. Hoop writes about challenging a class of sociology students to spend 72 hours offline. As one of her students noted, “I had to tell my family and friends about this to prepare. Ironically, the fastest and most efficient way to do this was through a [Facebook] post. My post simply said: "wish me luck, no cell/phone/internet for 72 hours."


    This student was hardy unusual: Whether someone is planning a social med...

  • As per Sacasas — thi isn’t the backlash we need. Unplugging doesn’t solve the bigger issues. As L.M. Sacasas writes in The Tech Backlash We Really Need,


    The tech backlash, emerging as it has within this centuries-old trajectory, will not achieve the perspective necessary to offer a substantive evaluation of our technological disorders. The critique emanates from within the system, assumes the overall beneficence of the system, and serves only to maximize the system’s power and efficiency by wor...