yewknee.com

Turn Off, Tune Out, Drop In

Over the past year I've encountered a number of articles promoting the notion of "Slow Living" - taking a moment to tune out the cacophony that is The Internet and just exist. A return to form if you will. This Washington Post article is another in that same line of thinking and contains a few interesting factoids:

In 2006, the world produced 161 exabytes (an exabyte is 1 quintillion bytes) of digital data, according to Columbia Journalism Review. Put in perspective, that's 3 million times the information contained in all the books ever written. By next year, the number is expected to reach 988 exabytes.

...

Unchecked "infomania" -- yes, there's even a term for this instapathology -- can lead to a lower IQ, according to a 2005 Hewlett-Packard study. The research, conducted by a University of London psychologist, found that people distracted by e-mail and phone calls lost 10 IQ points, more than twice the impact of smoking marijuana -- or comparable to losing a night's sleep.

Part of me is quite tempted by this notion of just completely severing the connection but then how would I spend my free time?