I sent a text out to my friends and family at 11:33pm on Friday night announcing that I was participating, yes, in a Media Fast for the next 24 hours. I then immediately set my cell phone to "airplane mode" so that I would no longer receive any texts anyone tried to send me.
I arranged earlier that night when my boyfriend would pick me up for work, and when my roommate would pick me up from work (since I don't own a car), so that we wouldn't have to worry about not being able to coordinate with a cell-phone.
I awoke the next morning (using my cell phone solely as an alarm clock.) My natural instinct as I was getting ready was to reach for my laptop since I usually listen to General Conference talks or music in the morning while I'm getting ready. But I refrained.
I had already established for myself that this fast excluded anything work- or school-related as I can't afford to fail a class, and especially not to lose my job. But actually, in many ways my job worked in my favor. You see, I teach Danish at the Missionary Training Center--a hub for media-deprived people: no cell-phones, no music, no Facebook, etc. Yet even this media-deficient center relies significantly on technology and media. The entire outline schedule of what we as teachers are supposed to do with missionaries that day is on the MTC's website, as are the displays we use for teaching the language, the necessary "Preach My Gospel" video-clips that we use for training, emails about meetings from my supervisor, etc. So from the very beginning of my day I did, unfortunately, have to use some media technology.
(I realized even further how dependent my job is on technology just earlier today when the entire server was down for a bit. We had no idea what to the plan for the day was, what grammar we were supposed to teach; and we couldn't even teach the Preach My Gospel Fundamental properly. Until to our relief, the system came back to life again.)
That day I had to work both the 7:30am-11:00am and the 5:30pm-9:00pm shifts because my co-teacher was out of town. Being a person who strives to optimize efficiency and lacking a car, I determined to just stay and work on homework at the MTC my entire break time. This did require me to use my laptop and the internet--there was no way I was going to sit around for six and a half hours doing nothing when I had a ton of homework hanging over me, the majority of which required computer usage. However I did strive to minimize my internet-use as much as possible. I was working on a PowerPoint presentation for my Danish class, and here are the only sites I used in working on that: BYU Learning Suite, danmarkshistorie.dk, Google Translate, and Google Images.
I was amazed at how productive my homework time was without having any emails, texts, or other social media forms of interruption. I actually haven't used Facebook much at all since the semester has started, so I realized that the only things that were really different in this "fast" than what I usually do were texts and my gmail (most of which is related to school and work stuff anyway.) Yet not being constantly interrupted by these things made it even easier for me to me effective.
I did have to go to the BYU site as well in order to put money on my Signature Card so I could buy lunch at the MTC cafeteria (that's the only way they'll take payment--yet further evidence of how our society demands the use of media.)
But other than that, my day was quite media-free. Yes, perhaps I had it a bit easier being in the sanctuary of the MTC, but I still learned a lot from the experience nonetheless. The next day after the "fast" I didn't even use my phone as much, and my mom asked me if I was still fasting, wondering why I still never responded to her texts.
While I was "disconnected" from the world, my cousin got engaged, I received a text from an old friend, plus another cousin I hadn't heard from in a long time. The interesting thing was that, since I didn't respond right away to these messages, once I finally did respond, I never heard back because I guess it was somehow too late. I suppose in some ways that shows that media is such an important part of society to keeping and building relationships and not being rude or anti-social.
All in all, an interesting experience. Yet I know I couldn't have managed at all if I had gone for complete abstinence from computers.
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