FORTUNE — I’m signing off Facebook for the month of August. And Twitter. And Instagram. And LinkedIn, Pinterest, & MessageMe. If you’d like to reach me before September, please send an email to my @fortune address or better yet, call me. I suspect I’ll have a bit more time than usual to call you back.
Put simply, I want to find out what I’ve gained — and what I’ve lost — since I first logged on to Friendster back in 2003. I don’t remember what my life was like before I had a profile pic. I’ve been writing about — and making efficient use of — social networking tools since I authored the first business cover story on social networking for Business Week in 2005. By stepping away for a month, I hope to see these technologies with new eyes — and to write smarter stories about how they will shape our future.
In case you haven’t noticed, it seems to have become a trend this year. In May, Paul Miller wrote about his experience living one year Internet-free for The Verge. The New York Times has written about digital detox camps, and Fast Company ran a cover story about a guy who unplugged for 25 days. Seriously, that was the conceit of the story.
I believe this is happening now because we American Internet users have reached a point of maximum social overload. I credit a perfect storm of new tools — smartphones, tablets, Up bands, Fitbits, and hell, even Google (GOOG) Glass — and new services that all feel necessary even as the old services (like Facebook) remain staples. Each morning when I wake, I check (in this order): Text messages, work email, Gmail, Yahoo (YHOO), Instagram, Facebook (FB), Twitter, and then anything else on my iPhone notifications panel.
Much as with any other technology , we need to figure out how to integrate social services (and here I am defining social broadly as including email and text as all of these services now have a social network at their core) into our lives. Remember when we all got cell phones in the mid-90s? For several years, we let them ring in restaurants and movie theaters and answered them mid-conversation before we developed a set of cultural norms around how to use them. This set of culture norms is harder to pin down with social services since the services themselves are evolving so quickly.
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For several years, I’ve sought the refuge of an international vacation each spring in order to wean myself off the Pavlovian response to reach for my pocket every time I feel a vibration. I’ve enjoyed small windows of solitude in Hungary and Croatia and Turkey, but even these far-flung destinations are hyper-connected. (A couple of years ago, I shut off my phone, donned a backpack and hiked to a bed-and-breakfast on the south coast of Turkey only to come across a wedding party dancing to the popular Turkish pop song lyrics: “Facebook! Facebook! I met a girl on Facebook!”)
Also, a vacation is, by definition, a break from routine.
So this summer, I’m choosing instead to explore the impact of this technology on my routine. I have constructed a set of somewhat arbitrary rules to cut down on my social intake:
— I will be available over both work and personal email between 9am and 6:30pm, the hours in a basic work day.
— I will also be available on my work phone and my cell phone. At home, I plan to leave my phone in the kitchen, in the area once reserved for a landline. (I ditched mine in June 2003.)
— I will not be available at any time on any social service.
— I won’t be available over any instant messaging service.
— I will not text.
It’s harder than I thought to figure out how to disengage. For one, social services have no incentive to offer vacation responders in the way that my email does; after all, once we leave for a brief period, we may not come back. Also, my social feeds provide the backbone for many of the tasks that I do online — from watching movies on Netflix (NFLX) to ordering food through Seamless. Trying to decouple the tasks from the networks is daunting. And: Social is not just social. It’s critical to my work life. I have no doubt I will long for LinkedIn (LNKD) before important business meetings this month in the same way that I craved caffeine when I tried to give up my morning coffee last summer. It won’t be pretty.
But, I plan to keep notes on the process, and I hope to learn a bit more about myself — and as important, about these social technologies I cover — in the process. I’ll share these thoughts at month’s end. And I’ll look forward to hearing your thoughts on any similar journeys. Extra attention goes to the letters I receive by snail mail …
