TL;DR: I have been offline for a week, talking to people, and it was a good thing.
I don’t really want to propagate all the stuff you can read in your favourite online medium on the topic of “living offline”, but I have to say that being offline for a while really helps people who are addicted to some online news sources. The general idea is to substitute content consumption by content creation, or at least by fruitful discussions with interesting people. At some point you can just ask yourself: Will something change if you do not follow the latest news from $SOURCE? In the most cases, the honest answer is a “no”, and you can happily go interact with real life people.
I’m aware that this post is getting somewhat chaotic. What I’d like to begin with – and there is not much more, really – is that the whole “Web 2.0” hype did not lead to real “user generated content”, as the marketing department tells you. What I observe is that the most popular platforms are being used mostly to repost, retweet, and share, not to create content. Surely, something is being created. But generally, the use case is “hey, look at this nice item”, which is not bad in itself, but I feel that this is considered to be the only use case. Just think of pictures with the only information being text on it. Seriously, guys and gals?
This is also one reason why I am somewhat irritated by (also my own) internet dependency. Ideally, one should create content as well as consume some, but in fact, the trend seems to show towards consuming more than creating. Which brings me to the original question: if the only thing you can do with internet content is to consider it as entertainment, then why not consider an alternative world where you create some entertainment for yourself just by talking to real, living people? Not even face to face, online communication is sufficient.