I will be spending the year 2020 offline as part of the candidacy process for my PhD program at McGill in Montreal. I will be journaling daily and sharing highlights with friends and interested others through mail-outs twice a month.

 

If you would like a copy mailed to your place, please send me your address and the price of postage per the amount of bimonthly mail-outs you would like to receive. ($1.25/mail-out for Canadians, $2/mail-out to the USA, $4/mail-out to other locations.) The maximum you can request, of course, will be 24 mail-outs, twice monthly for the 12 months of 2020. You will be able to sign-up partway through the year. (One of my friends will check and let me know if new people sign-up during my offline year.) You are welcome to donate more than the price of postage if you would like to sponsor the related documentary film project, described in the goals section below. 

 

Starting soon, you will be able to sign-up and pay for mail-outs on this site. If you would like me to remind you when that becomes available, send me an e-mail at aronr@aronr.com or phone/text me at 438 832 4962. You can also sign up non-digitally over the phone or by mail at 4437 Henri Julien Av, Montreal, QC, H2W-2K9.                                                

                                                                                                                                          -Aron Rosenberg

 

Short-term goals:

• Explore how the educational system and other institutionalized experiences are organized or coordinated for an ideal student or citizen who is digitally connected and literate in particular ways. 

• Share ideas and analyses uncovered during this investigation through bimonthly mail-outs.

• Enjoy a year offline.

 

Long-term goals: 

• Help uncover the ways people’s experiences of the internet impact their lives and the world. 

• Support educators hoping to work with young people to unpack the implications or consequences of their connectivity and build towards responsible or critical digital literacies.

• Create a collaboratively designed, filmed, and edited documentary about my own experiences offline and about the experiences young people have navigating a digitally connected world.  

 

Terms and Conditions

From January 1st to December 31st, 2020, I will not use the internet in any intentional ways. Acceptable Exceptions Include:

1. Unintentional uses (like walking into a store that’s playing music from an online streaming service).

2. Although I will only use cash for the 2020 year and I will always take it out from a teller, this teller’s use of the internet.

3. Although I will not use the internet to search library catalogues, when I take a book out from a librarian, their use of the internet in loaning the book to me. 

4. As people sign-up for mail-outs partway through my offline year, a friend will share the names and addresses of these people with me.

5. Shabbas Goy Clause– Although I cannot ask someone to use the internet for me, if they do something online for me without my suggestion, directly or indirectly.