Blackout Assignment

In this blackout assignment, I found that being unplugged from the internet can have a great effect on your daily routine. At times it was sort of difficult to keep myself unplugged from the internet, there were many times where I came close to opening my phone and googling something because at this point it’s a habit of doing so. This is due to the fact that when something grabs my attention and curiosity, I feel the need to find out more about the subject. To take this challenge seriously, my social media apps were deleted from my phone. One thing that made this challenge a little “easy” is that I was sort of calm and more focused on not checking my phone because there were no sport games or interesting event that I wanted to watch between Friday and Saturday, my favorite soccer team played on Sunday. The first day of the blackout, Friday went by relative fine since I had class all day and had my attention was just on school related topics. By the end of the day I was feeling mentally tired, at home there was no need for me to be on my phone. Going to Saturday it was sort of annoying not checking the weather, I usually would check the news as well, but it was fairly easy going to work by just listening to music on the ride. After work, I had to do some school assignments and had to use my laptop. This is what was the most challenging aspect because there were times where I had to search something on the internet This 48-hour blackout was an interesting challenge because at this point in time we basically need internet to do most of our daily work as a college student. When I was doing school work on Saturday night I had to search for information on the internet, this was difficult because I have this habit of taking breaks and going on reddit or another site to distract me for a quick minute. Having this routine, there were times where I open a separate tab and typed reddit but having the blackout in mind I got out quick. When the blackout was over, the thing I missed the most was just the lack of basic information, like the weather. In terms of news, it was interesting because politics have sort of grabbed my attention over the past few years. As a result, I have been trying to develop a routine to check NYT and other publishers. This experience taught more than just where and how I get my news, it sort of helped me understand myself a little. In the sense that being plugged to the internet feeds your mind with a lot of unnecessary content, but with this blackout it makes you realize how easy we can obtain information online. Being unplugged gave me this feeling of living under a rock because I was no longer “connected” to my friends through social media. When I checked my accounts these apps sort of created this explosion of new information that I had missed over the days. It gives you perspective on the amount of news you can get online, there is a constant flow of information that you are always getting when you are plugged to the internet.