The digital intensity of weekends – a critical dimension of life we can choose

Over the last six months, I suppose it is, I have been engaging a lot less online during weekends. Of course it isn’t a coincidence that our younger daughter Phoebe was born just over a year ago. However it is more recently that I’ve pulled back more.

Most visibly I don’t Twitter (that) much on weekends, and these days I rarely return emails on weekends. I used to keep on top of email during weekends.

Anyway, it’s just a personal choice and reality that the cycle of my digital engagement is focused over five days, then I pull back for two days. It’s not that I’m totally off the computer – for example I’m able to write this blog post now as Phoebe is having her afternoon nap and no doubt I’ll be touching base with the world of the web later today.

However it is an absolutely critical dimension to our lives. Some people choose to keep away from technology – or at least a desktop computer – completely during weekends, and even set rules about it. Others keep on engaging in exactly the same way on weekends as during the week, or even intensify their presence as they indulge in their favorite pastime. Many like to keep on top of their communication so they don’t start Monday morning with a backlog to deal with.

How do you spend weekends? Do you connect to the world on the net more, the same or less on weekends than weekdays? And is that how you want it to be?

So much of our future is about us choosing how we use technology.

http://everydayanarchy.net Shawn Bowman

Interesting post! As you say, the choices we make in our uses of technology make all the difference, especially as our technology becomes the medium through which we increasingly interact with the world around us.
Speaking from my own experience, I tend to use the computer a bit less during the weekends (this post being an obvious counter-proof ), mostly because the computer is largely a tool of my trade and I like to get away from all-things-office on “my time”. That said, I DO have personal interests that are facilitated by technology use – research about something that interests me, the occasional computer game, etc – in those cases, I don’t mind ‘plugging in’ in order to pursue those ends.
I think that it goes without saying that the nature of the Web and social media are such that they tie into every aspect of our lives – we’ve gone from a static, top-down, controlled content delivery model to an on-demand model: seems only natural that, as the computer becomes the ubiquitous dispenser of all things media that we’ll be spending more time with it.
I think that whatever limits are set have to be centered around a conscious interaction on our parts, always asking whether our living is being facilitated by our computer time…or whether it’s being replaced by it.
And, of course, that means different things to different people.