Living 'unwired'

This should be no surprise to anyone, and given that I'm keeping a daily blog of my experience here, it should be even more obvious that I am an avid user of the internet. My life at College has been one of connectedness: Emails, Text messages, cell phone calls, Skye and AIM, not to mention constantly checking the web. At all times at school I have with me my cell phone and a way to get my email/internet, whether that be my ipod touch or my laptop. I cannot even tell you how many times a day I check my email not to mention when I'm sitting at my computer and it is just up in the background waiting for a new message to come in. I average enough text messages to fill a short novel every month, with plenty of call minutes used in-between. I keep my calendars, tasks, contacts, and just about everything else for day to day life on the 'cloud' that is the internet.

Coming to Europe is like kicking the habit.

Since I've been here I have used the Internet for exactly 24 hours. I know that because I am required to buy Internet in 24 hour increments of usage from the hotel, and my first 24 ran out just before I started writing this post. 24 hours mind you is not much at all for me. Just enough to check my emails, update the blog, talk to some people on skype, and read my favorite website, Gizmodo. This also includes a couple times I forgot to logout of the internet system here and lost a couple precious hours due to my negligence.

Speaking of Gizmodo, they are covering CES this past week, an event for all things electronics and techy, and normally I follow it online pretty closely. I normally check gizmodo about 15 times a day, but I found myself today catching up on 4 days worth of old news and articles in my favorite world of technology.

I have still not purchased a cell phone, and am almost enjoying holding out getting one. It's nice sometimes to not be so constantly connected. For the first three days my mind kept playing tricks on me, making me habitually reach for my front left pocket, thinking that my cell phone was vibrating and that I needed to answer a text or a call. To check the time I now have to look at my wrist instead of reaching into my pocket, and let me tell you, reading an analog clock has felt almost foreign (as it should I guess). No longer am I walking around with headphones constantly around my neck or on my ears, all at the same time checking twitter feeds or facebook from my ipod while I'm walking to and from class.

My life for so long has strongly incorporated technology to a point where I'm constantly 'wired'. Villanova's #1 most wired campus award back in 2006 was a selling point to me. You could say being connected is my caffeine that gets me through the day, so the next three months has me involuntarily (and in some cases voluntarily) scaling back on my intake. So far I haven't seen any withdrawl symptoms, but we'll see what comes of it over the next three months. I'll just have to switch to another sort of caffeine, Cappuccino anyone?