Digital Detox or Digital Rehab? some starting thoughts on audience

About a month ago I arrived in the picturesque  Italian town of Udine. The first thing I noticed when I arrived was not it's Venetian arches, it's cobble stoned alleys, the smell of fresh bread and basil, or even the godly german/italian men on bikes threading through the city ... the only thing I thought about for the first three days were two resounding words: no service.

I had run out of travel credit. And when I checked in to the residence where I was staying two words became four

 NO SERVICE and NO INTERNET

and the words kept multiplying:

“Not for three days... they're fixing it!” Two desperate young housemates also holidaying and in similar situations were almost in tears (one had no phone at all! the horror!)

“ Ok, let's be calm” I said “ where is the nearest internet caffe`?”

“ No one knows ...  AND we have no internet to find it !”

We wound through the alleys and stood on street corners with my incapacitated phone, eyes fixed on the screen, searching for a decadent whif of someone else's wifi.

When Bernadette and I hit the streets, camera in tow ( stay tuned for the full video), hoping to find out what other members of the 'switched on' gen y thought of a situation where everything turned off; it seemed their words multiplied in exactly the same way...

“ If I can't use the internet... I would use my cell phone” was Brian's immediate reaction. “ Oh I can't use my cell phone …. um ... can I use a pay phone?"  Have a listen to what Brian, Eloise and Tindai have to say :

Psychology student Stefano likened his feelings for the internet to his understanding of drug addiction take a look:

In essence, to me and to everyone we spoke with the internet represents; communication ( everyone mentioned Facebook), entertainment and ultimately connection.. to us, a 'digital detox' would be far from a therapeutic experience: it would mean being rudely cut from a social world... 

But this isn't an ideal of the internet that everyone shares, in fact it is an ideal characteristic for the most part of generation y... After talking to some other people I became acutely aware that for our blog topic we had not one but two potential audience 'types', the second in a very different life stage and holding a very different attitude about what it means to be always connected...

“ I would not mind at all if it all shut down, then maybe I could have some peace... and a bit of silence”.  Vincent Scali, accountant and tax consultant is from audience type number two. It is not surprising that many, like Vincent, want to go back to the idyllic old days without the internet considering the statistics in (this Forbes.com article). Because of the internet, the world of work can now saturate the lives of it's victims even more: to give an indication, only two percent of American business decision makers have their weekends and nights to themselves and over half work around the clock (even weekends).

“ I am on the internet all the time, on my phone, on my laptop...Because the internet is omnipresent, people in the working world are expected to be too... no it's not about fun or communication or making our lives easier , for us it's about work, working all the time ” Vincent adds.

Clearly Vincent's words multiply in a very different way to the way mine did; no internet, no stress. A second source, (an employee of a mining company who wished to remain anonymous) during the course of the interview took pleasure in deleting 3 voice messages without listening to them. He laughed this off and admitted that in the past he had also deleted emails: “ I get hundreds a day and they're all 'important'! Sometimes I just sit there all day reading emails and replying... sometimes people from across the office send me emails... come and talk to me!”

So when we talk about the idea of a digital detox in relation to these two conflicting perspectives of what the internet actually is, we are talking about traumatising some for their own good and liberating others. We are talking about a digital detox for the willing but digital REHAB for some . It is interesting to note that most digital 'detox' destinations offering technology free packages specifically target people from the stressful world of work by virtue of targeting people who can actually afford to stay at their luxurious locations. 

I guess the rest of us addicts need to learn something from this second group of busy bees and put up our 'gone fishing' signs while we still can... Maybe learn to fish first.