Though I’ve never watched it, the premise behind Frontier House is that families try to survive using only technologies and methods available in the 1800s. Similarly, I’ve often wondered what life was like before the internet, I’ve decided to conduct a similar experiment and spend a few weeks without high speed internet access at the new home. This is in response to personal concerns that I spend far too much time absorbing as much information as possible, without time to adequately reflect on what I’m reading (is also a function of being cheap). This phenomenon has only grown worse with new technologies that allow time between publication to approach zero. Utilities like Temptation Blocker, and the success of news aggregation sites seem premised on this situation as well.

Initial results: much removed from the pressure of feeling like something-sort-of-interesting-somewhere is being missed, one is free to pursue slower activities, such as cooking and sleeping. Health benefits are probably balanced: time spent exercising will probably increase though alcohol intake also appears to increase commensurately with boredom. Overall diet will probably improve.

My hope is that the results of this experiment will: 1) shed light on what daily life was like for my parent’s generation, 2) better help manage content filtering and aggregation in the future. I have the luxury of not being tied to a Blackberry at this stage in my career. Learning how to limit information consumption would seem critical for future mental health, if these trends continue.