PRESENT TENSE:I HAD A few days away from the computer last month. The sighing sound was my brain drawing breath, relaxing, then exhaling in relief. The shuddering which followed was that of the withdrawal symptoms kicking in, writes Shane Hegarty.
Which was a shame, because I had briefly broken an appalling routine (although when I say "routine", I really mean to say "addiction") in which I was drawn to the keyboard and screen first thing in the morning, countless times during the day, in the evening before dinner, then after dinner, then before bed, and maybe a sneaky look before I got too sleepy.
It bled into the weekends and into holidays, when even turning off the phone would lead to me being driven half-crazed with suspense over what messages lay within, waiting to chirp gleefully upon release. My first, almost unconscious instinct in any hotel was to register the location of the nearest web access.
Until recently I wrote a daily blog, and when I posted on this particular problem a few weeks ago I received an empathetic response from some readers. Then, at the end of last month, I ceased writing the blog altogether, partly due to the grind of keeping the thing going, day after day, in posts and comments. Since then I still have a Pavlovian response to the glow of the screen, but without the blog to write I often stand there, paralysed by momentary confusion, while my brain gently implores me to back away from the keyboard.
Yet, I am not as plugged in as so many other people. I do not own a Blackberry. I balked at the price of the iPhone. I do not Twitter. I am not LinkedIn. I have never been Del.icio.us. You will not find me on Facebook, Bebo or MySpace.
Still, I sometimes have the nagging fear that I should be doing all those things, that it is better to be washed away in the fast-flowing stream of popular culture and technology than to be standing on the bank wondering if people are waving or drowning. This suggests that there is not only oppression from the technology we do use, but increasingly from that which we don't.
Technology is supposed to have set us free, instead we are tethered to it, responding to its rings and chirps, start-up jingles and error sounds.
We are irresistibly drawn to the glow of the screen, jolted by the way a phone will suddenly vibrate and attempt to shimmy off the table. We graze constantly for information. We check our mails, our texts, our messages.
We have some notion that we have created technology for our own ends, moulded it around our individual needs. Yet, we are so beholden to it now that many of us get jittery if the phone dies, our e-mail access is cut or our broadband freezes.
What is this if not a techno tyranny? If computers were to become sentient in the morning, they'd hardly need to make any efforts in their enslaving of the human population. We'd willingly open an account with www.human-slave.com.
By the way, none of this is intended as a flirtation with neo-Luddism.
Del.icio.us is a very useful programme for bookmarking web pages; social networking sites connect people in a way that was largely unforeseen a decade ago; the short text blogs of Twitter broke the news of the China earthquake before the mainstream press; and the iPhone makes absolutely everyone who looks at it mutter an impressed, Keanu Reeves-esque "whoah".
And the web, in so many respects, does offer the opportunity for freedom. If this wasn't the case, then regimes in China, Burma and North Korea wouldn't spend so much money and time trying to stifle it. On a professional level, it is a deep well of instant information. On a personal level, it is the most entertaining time-waster we could ever have hoped for.
However, there are times when it simply becomes too much; a point at which you are never out of contact, never off work, never alone. A point when the days become too short to do everything; when your brain becomes too full to absorb everything that has landed in your mental inbox.
There are few of us who would like to return to the pre-digital days, but it would be good to get occasional glimpses of the simple life.
I thought that it would be fascinating if we were to set aside one day a year on which we turned off the world's non-essential computers for a day - 24 hours of digital silence. It turns out that I am not alone in the idea.
The last Sunday of every January is International Internet-Free Day, which proclaims its worth as follows: "Because people's faces are clearer in reality than YouTube . . . Because you can't subscribe to an RSS feed from your grandma . . . Because if this has riled you, you really need it . . ." However, you'll gather that my noticing this five months after it happened suggests it's not as successful an event as it would like to be.
So perhaps we need an enforced sabbatical. Some legally-enforced severing of the internet connection. Something that would give our minds some breathing space, a few minutes of calm and serenity - just before the developed world collapses into Lord of the Flies-type societal breakdown.
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