A student experiment: life without a mobile or Facebook

It's no secret, or surprise really, that young people are obsessed with their phones and online social networking. What do young people do? Socialise, talk about their social interactions and then socialise some more.
Dirk Meyer, president and CEO of AMD, told the Abu Dhabi Media Summit last week that every day 60,000 pictures are uploaded to Facebook. We were also told at the summit that 1.7 billion people have access to the internet, with two billion more expected over the next five years.

The experiment I thought was interesting enough to blog about was reported by Jenna Ross in the Star Tribune this week.

Universities across the US are giving students assignments to turn off their mobiles, laptops, and anything else that could connect them to the outside world electronically. Ross writes that a professor at the University of Minnesota asked her class to go five days without any gadgets or media that didn't exist before 1984, (perhaps to inspire some Orwellian-type rejection of media's influence).

Ross reported that the professor, Heather LaMarre, "didn't realize she's part of a trend: A growing group of instructors around the country are prescribing their highly wired students a kind of shock treatment. Go without media for 48 hours. Turn off your phone for a day. Block Facebook for a week".

I read a similar study conducted not too long ago in the UK, and the results seemed to yield similar results. "Students are finding the fasts anywhere from impossible to freeing - and sometimes, over time, both."

Whatever the result of such experiments, the snowballing momentum of our need to be connected to our social network, is unlikely to be assuaged. As one UK survey by a mobile phone supplier, Carphone Warehouse, found. According to the findings, £1 million (Dh5.23m), would not be enough to convince a third of the 1,256 subjects to give up their beloved handsets.