Let your mind lie fallow

This time in the airplane without internet is a conundrum. One one hand, it's a great time to watch movies, listen to podcasts, read the newspapers that I picked up (haven't done this yet actually), and in general get away from the internet.

I just finished writing a whole long regurgitation of what I spent the last couple days doing, and I know that I wouldn't have gotten around to doing that if I'd had blogs to read, people to twitter with, and facebook to distract myself with. On the other hand, I've got a few drafts of blog posts in Gmail that have been marinating for anywhere from a week to a month. I would have loved to work on those, but I can't get to them!

The bigger point of this post though, is something that I think Gary Vee has written or spoken about before: as our internet-free spaces diminish, it's going to take conscious effort to carve out time and space for those activities which have already been encroached upon by the increased connectivity.

I've gotten really used to having my email (and lots of other stuff via the browser) on my smartphone. I've also set it up to receive quite a few people's twitter updates by SMS. This actually has two distinct effects. The first I realized when I got on the plane to go to Europe. Since I use Sprint, which runs on the CDMA standard (as opposed to GSM like AT&T andd T-Mobile), my phone was not going to work at all. It became a glorified watch, though I played the games on it once in a while and took some notes. I digress. The first effect is that I was no longer instantly connected to everyone. I couldn't read my email from 8pm on Saturday night until sometime mid-morning on Monday. Obviously this speaks a lot to my own personal addiction, but I think there are other people out there in the same boat. I couldn't check the news on the New York Times site, or Google random stuff. Twitter didn't bother me quite as much, though it was a odd feeling to look at my phone every once in a while and realize there were no text messages. Even once I had access, it's somehow not really as interesting to read 8 pages of twitter updates in one gulp. As we talked about at PodCampPhilly, twitter is like a stream, and you can sip, drink deeply, or dive in. But once the water's under the bridge, you have to let it go.

The second effect is the question of being present ... in the present. This has been mentioned a few times by Chris Bartlett on twitter in his discussions with (@jimberly?), of some sort of Heisenberg uncertainty principle for twitter. If you're tweeting an event, you are thereby changing it. As much as I appreciate reading about speeches, conferences, and discussions that are happening elsewhere, I have wondered both as an tweet-reader and as a event-participant what the effect of people checking out (even if only briefly to write 140 characters) has on discussion, participation, and even the tweeter's experience of the event. Are you listening if you're writing?

This isn't just a twitter issue, but twitter is probably the clearest example of it. It probably started with pagers, though they were a push mechanism. Then came cell phones, where people would call in the middle of dinner or a deep conversation. Even if you ignore it, it definitely disrupts the flow. Then came things like blackberries, iPhones, etc. where we not only are interrupted by "push" notifications, but may just stop to check email or look up something referenced in passing in conversation.

Another observation is that these technology-enabled mental wanderings take place in natural lulls in conversations and discussion. What does it mean for us if we constantly fill up the quiet and empty spaces in our existences with additional stimuli? Should we let our minds like fallow in these short interstitial spaces and in the longer ones on airplanes, subway rides, and whatever else?