Cesar Rodriguez knew he was addicted to electronic devices. But the Los Angeles 10th-grader had no idea just how sick he was.
"I can't stand it," he wrote in his journal on the second day of a one-week attempt to survive without television, iPods, cellphones, BlackBerrys and computers. "I woke up last night but I was still kind of asleep and I was having a dream about my phone and I started to bang my head against the pillow. I AM GOING CRAZY!!!"
On Tuesday, which happened to be day seven of the great experiment, I visited the still-shaky Rodriguez and the rest of Shannon Meyer's unplugged homeroom students at their downtown charter, the California Academy for Liberal Studies Early College High School.
Detox hasn't been easy for these BlackBerry babies. They were born into a digital world of wireless links, with headphones where their ears should have been. Meyer, trying to teach them something about true connectedness and solitary reflection, asked them to go cold turkey and take notes. With pen and paper.
Midway through the experiment, Meyer -- who is of the radical opinion that students and others should spend less time with electronic gadgets and more time reading old-fashioned newspapers -- had e-mailed me a progress report.
"We are all going crazy," she said. It seemed to me a little unsporting that she was e-mailing me despite having joined in the media fast herself, but she explained that she was making an exception only to answer work-related e-mails. As to the upside: "I think some of the kids have discovered they have younger brothers and sisters," she wrote.
Andres Lopez told me he'd been so bored he went to a barber and had his shaggy locks shorn, "Just to fill the void."
Jose Alvarez said he had tried Pilates and something even more exotic: "I cleaned my room."
Mario Canaba was turned so upside down, he actually played with some of his mother's day-care kids, but described the experience in a single word: "Painful."
Angie Gaytan lost track of the days and had a strange episode of disorientation in which she found herself staring at a piece of chicken
"I felt weird and out of order," Valerie Lira wrote in describing the experience of waking up and not turning on the television.
Rodriguez, confessing the media fast was "the hardest thing I have ever had to do," drank a lot of water, like a man trying to make it across a desert. At his lowest point, trying desperately to kill time, he accidentally broke a lamp.
