Seven Days Without the Feed

First thing in the morning, before I’m even fully conscious, the phone is already in my hand. Last thing at night, same ritual in reverse. At some point the internet stopped being a place I went to and became the medium I live inside—and I couldn’t tell you exactly when that happened or whether I ever agreed to it.

London agency Mother ran an experiment in 2013: take five digital natives—people for whom being offline would be a genuine deprivation—and cut them off completely for a week. No Facebook, no Twitter, no blogs. Fashion blogger Maria Pizzeria was one of them. The resulting documentary follows what happened, and it’s less a detox story than a small portrait of dependency—of people suddenly aware of the scaffolding they’d been standing on without ever looking down.

What I find honest about the premise isn’t the withdrawal symptoms or the forced rediscovery of analogue life. It’s the question sitting underneath all of that: do we actually like this, or have we just never stopped long enough to notice we don’t? Seven days would probably answer it. I’m not sure I want to know.