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Disconnected vacation

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As I write this, most of you in the northern hemisphere are probably on your way back to work after a well deserved vacation. Hopefully you managed to experience those things you dreamt of, played on the beach, hiked with the family, or just relaxed at home. For Swedes, the weather has not been the best for a vacation at the beach, but anyone living in this country knows that a long, warm summer is extremely rare here.

But no matter what you did during your vacation, I bet you have been carrying that small gizmo called the mobile phone in your pocket for most of the time. Only a few years back, the common view was that you should switch off your mobile phone and relax during your vacation. Just let it be off and enjoy your time with your family and friends. But now the mobile phone has become just as integrated into our lives as anything else.

By 2020, 90 percent of the world’s population over six years old will have a mobile phone and 85 percent of them will be connected with a mobile broadband connection. We communicate, pay, order, chat, act on social networks, take photos, listen to music, control our homes, plan our travel, buy our food, open the rental car, and find our way in the city with the phone in our hand. A study in the UK in 2014 shows that we look at our phones up to 1500 times a week.

I have one friend who voluntarily switched from a smartphone to a legacy phone. He chose to partly disconnect from the digital age and try to live more without the need of the smartphone. He admits it’s hard at times – a lot of things are planned and communicated using social networks. But he want to prove it’s possible to live without a smartphone and without social networks. I don’t doubt it’s possible. What I doubt is if it is possible to stay disconnected altogether?

Many times when I talk about the Networked Society at the Ericsson Studio I ask the audience if they are ready to switch off the data connection for one week on their phone. Over the years, very few have shown they are ready to do that.

I really would love to hear from someone who did just that, switched off the phone for at least a week. But the question is not if we will do more things with our phones in the future. It’s if we can live without them?

What I did during my vacation was to switch off sync of my work email, and I blocked calls coming from the Ericsson switchboard. Anyone that has my mobile number could still reach me. For me, that was just the disconnected vacation I could live with.


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