Melinda J. Irvine

I want to go offline.

I want to remove all my blogs, toss away my laptop and shutdown my social media accounts.

I want to remove all my email addresses and mobiles and smartphones.

I want to go offline.

For decades i have directed my eyes and ears and mind toward digitising my world. My years have connected and contributed toward a fictionised existance:  a concept instead a physical reality.

I feel i am now reduced to a photoshop-filtered digital version of someone who used to be a human being.

This morning, I walked through a mega-shopping mall, a place almost devoid of natural light. The only seats existing in user-paid spaces and natural green grass was growing on the roof. Real green grass growing but you weren’t allowed to touch it with your feet: you could look at it behind a rope and a security guard.

And as I was walking through that place looking for somewhere with ‘good signal’ a girl at a counter didn’t serve me becuase she was gazing at her cell-phone, the chef behind her (out back alone) was taking a picture of himself, two men (at different tables) were both lost in their laptops while a security guard at the front entrance was checking his messages.

I stood still, swept in an instant to recent train rides in Singapore, Manila and Brisbane completely devoid of humanness, and though (all of us) physically pressed against another corporeal being, we gazed instead into our digital selves.

We. You and me. Spending our days, our precious time looking at the world in dark digital places instead of going outside and seeing, and smelling, and tasting, and feeling, and hearing the world alive around us.

When was the last time I went into a coffee shop and just smelled coffee? No book? No tablet? No laptop? No work? Nothing except me and the coffee? Not today, I confess I sat in that coffee shop with my laptop writing this.

And now here I am hours later editing, blogging, uploading pictures (did you see the one above?) of the chords and adapters and leads I need to run all of my gadgets in order I can write, record, distribute and tell.

Every time I blog I take you away from your real life and, into your imagined belief of mine. I keep you here dear reader online.

That is, if you are listening and actually still here, all the way past the scroll bar and ‘read more’ icon. Unlikely.

I’ve have already lost you but I’ll keep writing. To explain why I must depart.

I am a real human person and I want my life to exist as more than this. I want my truth. I do not believe my truth is here.

I intend to do this properly and thoroughly and delete every aspect of my digitised existence. Mmmm the blogs?

I am writing this down because I want you, my friends, my family, to know that this was done mindfully, intentionally and with purpose. So you will respect my decision and not try to talk me out of it.

I want to go offline. Can I go through with it? Even the blogs?

It could take a while. I’ll be back before I go.