In last year's post-apocalyptic sci-fi hit "The Matrix," Morpheus offers Neo a critical choice: "Take the blue pill. Wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. Or take the red pill. Stay in Wonderland and see how deep the rabbit hole goes."
A decision between accepting the world as it appeared — a beautiful illusion crafted to enslave humankind — and breaking free of the Matrix into a nightmare reality of burnt skies and computer domination. Neo swallowed the red pill and, for a time, so did I. The first week of March I undertook an Internet fast, abstaining from all e-mail and Web use. I disconnected from the network of URLs and inboxes that permeates our lives — the real-life "Matrix" so indispensable to social interaction and academic work at Princeton.
After taking his red pill, Neo awoke in a vat of nutrient-sucking slime. My experience was far more banal. The morning of March 1, I found myself in bed. I unplugged my Dormnet cable from my PC, but nothing else seemed different. My favorite breakfast cereals had the same sweet flavor and crunchy texture I knew so well: a sharp contrast to the bland synthesized mush consumed by Neo and his comrades in "The Matrix." I soon realized that my Net-less journey in Princeton would prove less drastic than Neo's crusade to save his world. Still, I thought that my experience could hold insights into how deeply the Internet penetrates my life. And so I ventured on.
Contrary to my expectations that I'd feel "withdrawal pains" from giving up e-mail, my week-long fast began with surprising ease. Of course, the fact that I had to totally break my connection to the Internet indicated how little control I had over using it. There was no middle ground for moderating or reducing my interaction with the Web and e-mail. Going cold turkey was the only way to escape the Matrix. For the fast, I swore off checking e-mail and anything that linked me to the Internet. I even avoided using the Firestone library catalog. (My thanks go to the reference librarian who unwittingly accommodated my fast by looking up books on the computer.)
Research at Stanford found that the Internet takes time away from friends and family. Ironically, I feared that my fast might produce the same effect since I'd be out of the loop of e-mail communication. I wasn't cut off from my peers, however. In fact, most were interested and very supportive. One went so far as to print out and hand me a couple of e-mails she had written. Another pulled an article off the Web for me that was required for class. But one of my friends became deeply frustrated by my self-imposed fast. Incessantly he pushed me to log on and check e-mail. I refused and tried to explain my interest in experiencing life outside the Internet. Eventually he cooperated with my fast and we talked more on the phone than we ever had before.
Not surprisingly, I found myself holding tremendous amounts of time in my hands. During the fast I did not saturate this "clean" time with demands for greater productivity. Instead, I treated it as a bonus. I goofed off. Sometimes I worked. At other moments I let myself be bored. I traded the Internet for the internal, and relished following a simpler schedule. But more than just freeing up time, my experience exposed how I was using time. I could see clearly where the hours went because they were frozen before me.
I bought a journal to record all my difficulties of a week without the Internet, but the pages went unfilled. No major crises sprang up. The days passed by smoothly. My fast became a vacation. As the end of my fasting week approached I grew concerned about getting back online. I had become accustomed to the relaxation and freedom that came from having an "inbox" only as full as the last conversation or phone call. But just as Neo reentered the Matrix to continue waging a campaign to free humans from it, so too did I reconnect to the Internet to re-engage my peers and share what I had learned.
Now that it's over, though, I still can't tell you what it's like to leave the Matrix. You have to experience it for yourself. Jason Brownlee is a politics graduate student from Raleigh, N.C. He can be reached at brownlee@princeton.edu.
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