James Sturm, one of my favorite cartoonists/graphic novelists, and the driving force behind the wonderful Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction, VT, has been writing an article for Slate.com wherein he tracks his four month-long period of going offline and giving up the Internet. Most of us may not think twice about how often we spend in front of our computers; we as librarians are well aware of how the Internet has revolutionized how we access information, but as a side effect we've also become somewhat tethered to a life online. Which makes James Sturm's articles all that more interesting--as the director of a school, the author and artist of a just-published book, and a well-regarded professional in his field, James expected that his experiment would have a fallout of near-Biblical proportions. Instead, he's experienced just the opposite; that people can still contact him, his book sales haven't suffered from his lack of obsessive reading of online reviews, and that life has generally improved. Check it out, it's probably one of the best ongoing articles I've read on Slate for a long time, and definitely worth spending a little bit of your time online pondering that ethereal world of a disconnected life.
MW
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