Should We Turn The Internet Off Once A Week?

One of my favourite books of all time is Ready Player One. If you don’t know what it is, go read it (or watch it if visual mediums are preferred), because it's one of the purest and best depictions of a metaverse ever, with the story mostly taking place inside a digital VR game world called The Oasis, which is basically as ubiquitous as the Internet is to us in this world. 

Outside The Oasis however, the ‘real world’ depicted in Ready Player One is one that has almost completely crumbled into anarcho-capitilism (wonder what that’s like?), meaning The Oasis functions as a sort of escapism for the downtrodden citizens of America, fleeing from oppressive corporate ownership and terrible working/living conditions.

At the end of the book (spoilers incoming!) our main character Wade Watts wins control of The Oasis, by completing an easter egg hunt that the now-dead creator left in the game, defeating the evil Innovative Online Industries who are looking to overtly monetise and destroy the game. 

One of the first things Wade does with control of this digital universe of wonder? He implements a rule that it is switched off one day a week, in order to get people to interact more in real-life and to curb some of the negative impacts The Oasis has on society.

I have recently done a little social media purge, and have been considering this part of the book for a while. With algorithms pushing our feeds towards doomscrolling and division, what would the world look like if we took a leaf out of Ernest Cline’s book and switched our own Oasis, the Internet, off for one day a week?

That’s what I want to explore in this blog, the completely hypothetical idea of switching off the Internet once a week, which I am personally in no position to take charge of as they revoked my access to the room with the Turn The Internet Off button after I rested a bagel on it for a laugh.

Let’s get stuck in!

Potential Benefits of Turning Off the Internet for One Day a Week

a. Improved Mental Health and Well-being

In 2024, we are constantly plugged into an absolute deluge of information, with a blistering 70 billion DVDs worth of data being created daily, almost all of it beamed to our phones which remain by our side and invariably six inches from our face 24/7. 

As we are literally falling out of the window of internet addiction as we speak, it’s hard for scientists to accurately predict the ‘splat’ sound we are going to make when we hit the floor, meaning we don’t actually fully know the impacts of the Internet’s pervasiveness on everyday life in the 21st century.

However, recent research has highlighted that 18 per cent of sampled teens at a standard US university are considered ‘pathological internet users’ and categorised a bunch of ill effects like functional impairment, depression, anxiety and even a tendency to feel less responsibility towards society and the environment.

So what kind of impact could we see from taking a break from the Internet?

Limiting social media has been shown to help boost sleep, reduce stress and limit the impact of depression and anxiety. Why is this though? What about social media is making us sad?

Some research suggests that it’s the comparative nature of social media that forces us to compare our lives with others and lowers our self-esteem, leading to depression and anxiety. There’s a stat called Dunbar’s number that always floats around that says human beings are only naturally meant to know 100-150 people maximum, as that’s the amount of people our simian brains can handle. What’s for damn sure is that it isn’t supposed to handle what your friend from primary school's brother is doing on a Thursday night.

As we face a mental health crisis moving into our brave new world, perhaps taking a breather (and getting back to our roots and meaningful connections) could be good for all of us.

b. Stronger Real-Life Social Connections

One of the main reasons for my little, groundbreaking and quite frankly brave-because-I’m-a-special-little-soldier hiatus from social media is that I felt like it was warping my perception of reality, and impacting my real-world relationships with people, reducing interaction into a “have you seen this meme? Oh what about this meme” competition. Reading that back I see that problem may have been my communication style and general personality more than the Internet…

Anyways, on the offchance it isn’t me and we want to limit one of the greatest technological marvels our society has ever produced based solely on my recommendation because of a book I read once, I think a day-off from the Internet could increase social connection. 

As early as 1986, scholars have argued that the fact that communication over the Internet is too one-dimensional, lacking the social cues of innate communication between humans like eye contact and the sigh your cab driver does when you ask them if they’ve been busy tonight. 

And this overreliance on a communication medium not fit for purpose is having real negative effects in our current age, with 62% of educators in a recent survey saying children are struggling to make and maintain eye contact when compared to 10 years ago. 

This isn’t just a case of ‘it was better in my day’. Eye contact, as uncomfortable as it is, is a crucial part of human communication which is being stunted by overuse of the Internet and the lingering effects of the pandemic. There’s even evidence of a correlation between people with “internet use disorders” (IUD) and more severe forms of ADHD, although it’s incredibly hard to determine whether people with ADHD are more likely to develop an IUD, or whether IUDs exacerbate the ADHD symptoms. Either way, it’s not looking good.

Taking a break from the Internet for a day of the week as a society might help us protect children from suffering its ill effects and lead to a more healthy future generation with better communication skills.

c. Positive Environmental Impact

Just like setting off fireworks, letting fire lanterns loose in a field of purely flammable material or ramping your friend Junebug’s ATV across a creek, sometimes fun can be bad for the environment. And that’s true of the Internet. The problem with the Internet’s impact on the environment isn’t that individual actions are bad per say, it’s that the vast usage of the Internet by around 70% of the global population almost constantly really wracks up. 

Whilst not as impactful as the more stereotypical Earth-f*ckers like gasoline guzzling cars, the Internet does produce roughly the same amount of greenhouse gases as the airline industry, which when you consider how much of that is brainrot memes and, let’s be adults, pornography, that is a really staggering toll for not much gained in return. Even seemingly innocuous things like emails give off a weirdly high amount of CO2, about 4g per email.

Cutting the Internet down by one day a week wouldn’t just have the effect of taking 1/7th off the carbon costs, it would also reduce our overreliance on it as a communication medium, probably also reducing costs on the other 6 days of the week as well, proving that no one needs send a passive aggressive email to their colleagues enquiring who ate their tuna salad they left in the fridge for a week, and instead they can accuse you to your face like a normal person.

Practical Considerations and Alternatives

The practical consideration is that this can never happen, and is solely the inane ramblings of a man trying to convince the world to shut off one of the most important economic resources in the world so that he doesn’t get FOMO anymore because his heart can’t handle Instagram. 

But what if the salient points were taken and a less dramatic, more bottom-up approach was taken? I read somewhere once that trying to convince people to become vegetarian for the environment’s sake is a fool's errand, because yes, in theory it would drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but people would give up too quickly for the effect to be sustainable. Instead they posit a global reduction of around 20-25% would actually yield better results as it would be easier to stick with for a long time.

What if we do the same for the Internet? What would a radical reduction in social media consumption and instant messaging services do for the global psyche, as well the development of the future generations? One can only hope to find out.