The best part of being NotComGuy was arriving at my desk every morning to silence and darkness.
Normally, the computer is already purring as I open the office door to a constellation of lights–the tiny, “ready” indicators on the printer, scanner, monitor, speakers and keyboard along with two twinkling heralds of voice-mail.
I then set aside that first hour for handling the messages, requests (some unprintable), solicitations and ruminations that have accumulated, checking news sites on the Web and sending out queries and greetings. But the one hour often stretches to three or more, and pretty soon it’s lunchtime and it’s not always clear what, if anything, I’ve accomplished.
So last week, when I unplugged almost everything and temporarily assumed the identity of NotComGuy, I filled those suddenly empty, quiet hours with productive reading, writing (by hand) and researching. And without the constant temptation to check for messages–a temptation I usually indulge 20 times a day or so–the workweek took on the serene rhythms of a vacation.
I invented NotComGuy as a response to DotComGuy, that geek in Dallas who’s getting lots of attention by hiding away in a townhouse and meeting all his needs through the Internet for one year. I limited my stunt–I mean experiment–to one week because I figured that digital deprivation is at least 52 times harder for the average modern person than digital immersion. And, honestly, because it would be professionally crippling to go low-tech for much longer than that.
I mean, if I had a nickel for every time in the last seven days that a source said “let me e-mail/fax that to you,” “You can find that information on the Web at . . .” or “I tried calling you but no one answered,” I’d have, well, 60 cents. But clearly the expectation in my world and maybe yours, too, is that information and messages can and should move anywhere instantly.
At first, it was liberating to be free of the nearly gravitational pull that this expectation has on me. I worked at single tasks for long, uninterrupted stretches and stopped worrying about what I might be missing or who might be missing me. Whatever it was could probably wait.
There’s a difference, after all, between immediacy and urgency. Yet all this technology–including cell phones and pagers, which I also forswore–has tended to blur the distinction to the point that every howdy-do arrives with the portentous swiftness that was once the hallmark only of telegrams.
In fact, when I went back on-line after completing 170 hours as NotComGuy, I found that of the hundreds of e-mails that had piled up, only one had been so pressing that missing it caused a small problem.
At the same time, reading it all reminded me what’s so compelling about being on-line–the easy, quick, often thought-provoking contact and feedback from friends, family members and readers from all over the world. Though the break was refreshing, by Friday the novelty had worn off.
I’ll probably take shorter at-work-but-off-line vacations again and recommend them to anyone who periodically wants to tap the brakes on runaway compulsive interactivity.
But I’ll never again choose to write anything without a computer. That part of being NotComGuy was ill-conceived. It’s been so long since I’ve written any other way that my entire approach to composition has inalterably changed from think-first-then-write to think-on-paper-then-revise-endlessly. The new style becomes a scribbly, scratchy mess covered with arrows when attempted longhand. I’m a slave to word-processing software and not worried about it.
I’m also not all that worried about getting sucked into fax- or voice-mail vortices and will leave those up and running as well next time I go NotCom. These are unglamorous labor-saving devices–the automatic washer/dryers of the office–and likely to diminish in importance over time, not take over anyone’s life.
The Net is different, though. It’s a medium that is steadily encroaching and can only be ignored by those who wish to live in the past. It used to be slow, confusing, expensive and confined, but it’s bursting its boundaries and soon the only limits on the territory it’ll conquer in our lives will be those limits we find the will to impose on it for ourselves.
It’s NotComGuy, not DotComGuy, who is ahead of his time.
