Johndan never commented on excessive withdrawal symptoms from his computer free month, but the Register is reporting on a study which suggests that some people experience serious withdrawal when deprived of Internet access:
Participants in the human experiment were deprived of the web for 14 days, and found themselves quickly succumbing to "withdrawal and feelings of loss, frustration and disconnectedness"
[...]
And it gets worse. While this cruel "qualitative" torture was inflicted on just 13 households containing 28 guinea pigs, a broader "quantitative" trawl of 1,000 web addicts found that 48 per cent of respondents could not go without the internet for two weeks. This unwillingness to even contemplate disconnection from the digital world was confirmed by Yahoo! chief sales officer Wenda Harris Millard, who reported: "This study is entirely indicative of the myriad ways that the internet, in just ten short years of mainstream consumer consumption, has irrevocably changed the daily lives of consumers. This is true to the extent that it was incredibly difficult to recruit participants for this study, as people weren't willing to be without the internet for two weeks."
re: Junkie
Yeah, I saw that piece--interesting. I actually didn't have much withdrawl. Which surprised me; I've been on networks since the early 1980s, and for the last ten years I've been online 5 - 10 hours a day, on average. But when I went offline, I quickly found other things to occupy my time. I read a lot of novels; I started a (print) journal; I began sketching; I played guitar more (although still badly).
I was surprised by the Register story, though, because I would consider myself an extremely connected person.. I would have thought "normal" people wouldn't have a problem getting by for a few weeks offline. Does this mean they're really that connected? Or is it just that people are shallow? (If you tried to recruit people for a study on the effects of giving up, say, coffee or tv for two weeks, would you get a similar response?)