Time off is better if you're offline

Photo / Thinkstock.

Opinion

The smartest idea of the summer so far comes from Andrew Little, the head of the Engineering, Printing and Manufacturing Union and president of the Labour Party: turn off your cellphone while you're on holiday.

His mandate being what it is, he had in mind the rights of the hard-pressed worker. Laptop computers with mobile broadband and email-capable cellphones have blurred the line between playtime and worktime and "bosses should tell staff that when they are on holiday, they are not obliged to be at the end of [the phone]," he said.

But disconnecting from the network offers rewards to everyone, not just employees wirelessly chained to virtual desks. Little was responding to American research showing that three out of five working adults checked their work email while on holiday and almost half of them felt "annoyed, frustrated or resentful" after doing so.

The moral is clear: you wouldn't invite the boss and workmates along on the camping expedition or road trip, so why conjure up their electronic avatars when you're trying to get away from it all?

But here's the challenge. What happens when you unplug from the network altogether for those few days? Few of us realise just how insidiously electronic communications subvert real ones, how stealthily our cyberlife takes over our actual one. We've all had the experience of a face-to-face conversation being interrupted while the other party responds to a cellphone's beep. The weird thing about it is that we accept it as normal when in fact - unless the text-checker is a firefighter or someone waiting for an organ transplant - it's what our parents would have called bad manners.

It's not hard to guess what Marshall McLuhan would have had to say about mobile internet. The Canadian media theorist, who died in 1980 before the invention of the PC, came up with the idea that technology's power to deliver content blinded us to the changes - by no means all for the better - that it wrought on the way we live our lives. What's the point, after all, of stopping to smell the roses when you can call up images of every conceivable kind of flower on a handheld device?

Well, you might find out if you press the off switch. Spend your days listening to the waves crashing on the shore, the squeal of seagulls, the giggling of the kids - and enjoying the feeling of the sand between your toes and the sun on your back.

To paraphrase the 60s counterculture guru Timothy Leary: "Turn off, tune out and drop out". It is a holiday, after all.