I got back from a weekend away with my family yesterday, having spent 3 days on the east coast of England with no laptop, no wifi, and limited mobile reception.
I’m not going to suggest that everyone should give up technology to go and live in a mud hut by the beach, but I will say that I was really glad of a break from the constant rollercoaster ride of working, blogging, meeting, working, reading,working etc to spend some time concentrating on the two most important people in my life.
We went to a wildlife park, a sealife centre, an old-fashioned English seafront, some deserted beaches, and quite often, the playground where we were staying, and we pretty much ignored the TV with the 4 channel selection I remembered from my childhood until late in the evening.
All extremely enjoyable, but I did miss some elements of internet access – and interestingly, it wasn’t really about access to entertainment. Sure I’d have quite liked to have watched the Formula One race at the weekend on demand, having missed it live, but the main things I missed were:
- Sharing my thoughts on my blog, and any conversation that occurred.
- Sharing my thoughts on Facebook and Twitter and any conversation that occurred.
- Being able to get information on things to do and places to eat quickly and easily.
Yet again I’m reminded that the value of the internet is about what it enables us to do, and not what it enables us to consume and passively accept.
And the more that marketing, publishing and disciplines finally realise that enabling worthwhile endeavours trumps triviality or passive consumption, the better we’ll all be.
OK, so that’s not really news, particularly if you read people like Umair Haque on a frequent basis, but yet it still isn’t happening enough yet.
And I think it’s the duty of those of us who have discovered how active participation not only benefits others, but also ourselves, to find ways to enable others in some way, by helping, sharing, encouraging, inspiring, and most of all, by doing.
(And as a note for the social media measurement fanatics amongst us – most measurement sites didn’t really fluctuate much due to 3 days of inactivity, although I did lose a point on Peerindex, presumably showing that I’m less influential on Tuesday than I was on Friday of last week!)