Inspired in part by Sherry Turkle’s “Stop Googling. Let’s Talk.” and in part by our own open-minded curiosity, 13 students in WRD103 volunteered to surrender their phones for four days — Tuesday, 10/13 to Friday, 10/16 — and to keep a phenomenological journal during that time.
Read some un-edited journal entries, below. The next step is to think about how to turn these experiences, questions, and observations into Op-Ed essays, or other reflective projects: 
Katy: “I actually had to use an alarm clock and watch”
Alex: “first instinct: tweet about it, and I did via twitter.com instead of the app (since I hadn’t had my phone taken for more than 5 minutes before I did this)”
Sam: “Insight: I actually have a skewed version of time and less patience. I have to wait for someone to email me back. I HAVE TO WAIT. WITH NOTHING TO DO… no Snapchat, Instagram, nothing.”
Charlie: “Notable differences I’ve noticed are that I miss my music. I can’t say I miss anything else.”
Cristina: “I asked my roommate several times to borrow her phone and I am pretty sure she got very annoyed.”
Gabi: “I keep feeling like I was missing something …”
Paulina: “I was talking to them, but they were doing something on their phones. “
Anela: “Right before I had to give my phone in I got really shaky and nervous.”
Dzejna: “As I was writing my name on the pink post-it and wrapping the rubber band around my phone, I felt a sense of anxiety and excitement in my stomach.”
Tania: “The first day sucked the most out of all 3 days.”
N.B. the world UNPLUGGED project has published numerous observations and claims about such projects done on an international scale — our version is more exploratory at this point — and one context they’ve documented does have a direct and generative connection to our class, since we read the New York Times as our primary text, in both print and digital formats:
‘We no longer search for news, the news finds us.’
- No matter where the students were from, the amount of information coming to them via their mobile phones or the Internet – via text message, on Facebook, Twitter, chat, Skype IM, QQ, email, etc. – is overwhelming; students are inundated 24/7. As a result, most students reported that they rarely go prospecting for “hard” news at mainstream or legacy news sites. Instead they inhale, almost unconsciously, the news that is served up on the sidebar of their email account, that is on friends’ Facebook walls, that comes through on Twitter. (Click here for more on what students said about ‘news.’)