Down time offline

This caught my attention the other day, the charming story of a holdout against the technological onslaught. It’s not defiance that makes him resist connectivity in the social network. It’s the simple desire to talk to people face to face.

He’s the brother of a Wall Street Journal reporter, and a great source of contacts. Because he talks to – and more importantly, listens to – people he encounters face to face in everyday life.

“His contacts are so diverse in large part because he’s offline. At age 52, he’s never sent an email, surfed the Web or bought anything online. With no BlackBerry to distract him in the grocery line, he’s likely to make a friend or two before checking out. With no Web page to instruct him on his latest project—how to grind sausage or build a cow fence or install a wood-burning stove—he seeks out the help and advice of neighbors who have done it, and during beer-drinking sessions afterward he listens carefully to their talk of health problems, banking habits and new-car purchases.

“I like talking to people,” he says. “I don’t understand this thing nowadays where people in the same room send each other emails instead of talking.”

Although my older brother always fancied himself old-fashioned, Internet trends are making him more so. As a stranger to the Web, my brother belongs to one of the nation’s fastest-shrinking minorities.”

The offline American, he says, will become virtually extinct (no pun intended, I think) in the coming decade.

Herb London is determined to remain a holdout. His column in Salvo proclaims “I Do Not Twitter”.

“Suppose, just suppose, you desire anonymity, a faceless existence in the digital age. You want to get lost in your own thoughts, far from the maddening crowd, a stranger in a distant land. Well, it is now close to impossible…

“All of these digital communication techniques are a part of a modernity that makes a desire for much privacy old-fashioned.”

Ah, but some desire the unplugged retreat out of necessity, and see it as sort of a sacrifice they must suffer……to get more plugged in later.

“Stephen Fry has announced he is going to quit Twitter to concentrate on his work.

“The 52-year-old writer, actor and comedian, who has more than one million followers on the social networking site, decided to say farewell to his fans to work on a new book.

“However, he has promised to return to the micro-blogging world once he has completed a follow-up to his autobiography….

“In a message to his fans, Fry said: “This morning I switch off most of my connections with the outside world, for I have work to do….

“He wrote that he needs “absolute peace” and “zero distraction” to concentrate.”

Which implies that being plugged in online and socially networked takes away peace and detracts from concentration.

So, why is he yearning keenly for the day when he’ll ‘be back amongst the online network’?