The Amish Project

[Video Link] A young man disconnects from the "cloud" for 90 days, on a mission to reboot his connection with the world and the people he loves in it. (via Joe Sabia)

• [xian]

  This message brought to you by the USPS.

  Kidding aside, I was actually just thinking last week that a technology fast for a week or two might be a good idea. Good on this guy for actually doing it.

• [Chicago_SC]

  I do this every year for one day; The National Day of Unplugging.

  March 23rd.

  http://www.sabbathmanifesto.org/unplug/

• [franko]

  i find it funny that he judges the strength of his connectivity to his world and the people in it by a pile of pieces of paper. just because i’m connected doesn’t mean i don’t get to do all the things and have similar experiences he claims to have discovered by “unplugging”, and it doesn’t mean online relationships are any less deep. i think it’s all about a balance, that’s all — not a black and white “one or the other” mentality.

  • [VerySincerely]

    Woa, defensive much? the pile of paper was an image used in this video to represent connectedness in an analogue world. Yes, you do have similar experiences, but I guarantee that if you print out a bunch of your e-mails and compare them to his letters, his letters win. That’s because email is not simply mail in electronic format. It’s faster, cheaper, less costly produce, and ends up with a bias towards superficiality.
    And he did do things that you couldn’t do because he has more time. While you’re busy reading boingboing, he’s moving around in the real world.

• [Nagurski]

  Nice idea. Nothing to do with Amish, though.

  • [guanto]

    I guess ‘Supersize Me’ would be ‘The America Project’ then?

    *ducks*

• [macegr]

  Having a social networking “addiction” is merely a sign of not having anything else to do. Grow up as a strict consumer and you’ll find that empty purchases and empty relationships are…empty, so you try to do more of both. Grow up learning and creating and you’ll have trouble finding enough time to spend on social networks to the point you feel guilty about it. There’s no way I would disconnect for three days, let alone three months, because virtually all of my communication is infrequent, important, engaging, and usually relevant to other activities and projects in my life. Yes, your 500 friends on Facebook are not important, thanks for realizing it…now, go do something cool.

• [mnegrini]

  I am sooo happy I can use the Internet without turning into a zombie. Am I alone, or the people with those experiments are actually douches?

  • [mnegrini]

    ….aaaand, of course, a hipster song in the video.

• [pamaro]

  Inspiring. Love the answer to “It’s the world we live in” rationalization. I was off of Facebook for two years. Now I do Facebook light. Much better that way. Get a few more people thinking like this and it may become a movement.

  • [The Life Of Bryan]

    …and all ya gotta do to join is sing it the next time it comes around on the guitar.

• [Sooper8]

  So, while I’m ‘off the dope’ I’ll photo random analogue stuff to use for….my online video when I plug back in!

• [JhmL]

  Kewl. You know what made this video a bit more smileworthy to me? The dude looked a bit like Mark Zuckerberg. 

  • [Art]

    I thought it WAS Zuckerberg!  ;)

• [ocker3]

  Sometimes, it’s fun to just hang out with other people in the same area, all doing your own thing. But I think the greater lesson to be learned here, is that we should use technology less as a thing to do, and use it more to arrange with other people to do things. It takes more effort to drive to someone’s house to share dinner with them, rather than eating alone and posting a picture of what we ate on FB, but overall, I like it better. 

• [TheMudshark]

  Che Guevara has nothing on this guy.

• [P Nielsen Hayden]

  I find it…odd that here’s a bunch of information about the benefits of unplugging from the cloud, and the only way I can consume it is by watching a web video.

  This is unadulturated old-fartism on my part, but I’m tired of how much web content is now in video form. I can read text much faster than I can watch videos. Video is great for showing inherently visual things, but tons of the video content on (for instance) Boing Boing could easily be presented as a couple of paragraphs of text instead.

• [SamSam]

  I guess my main issue with this is that I can’t help but wonder how much of those 90 days he spent thinking about this video he was going to make. 

  It reminds me of those people (there have been at least a couple posted here) who spend a year without money. Or without civilization. Or whatever it is. And then they come back and write a book about it and tell everyone how amazing their experiences were.

• [Rational νεόφυτος]

  Let’s see him do it for a year…

• [sota767]

  I was thinking he meant to actually speak directly to people in person to interact with them instead of through a computer. Using written communication is still a proxy in my mind, how is writing a letter to them different from just sending them an email?