• The Washington Post, Tuesday, August 7, 2007 10:45 AM

A professor at American University challenged a class of his undergrads to go without any kind of electronic media for 24 hours in an attempt to get them to think about the media-saturated world. "I wondered if they would balk, or even refuse to do it," writes Danna Walker. After all, it would mean no television, computers, iPods, radio, video games, CD players, records or phones for a full day.

While 18-to-20-year-olds may have vague memories of a time before iTunes, personalized ring tones, Facebook, etc., Walker notes that "like their contemporaries, the Olsen twins, whom they watched grow up in the media, they are no longer innocent. They have tasted the pleasures brought by binary code, and, like most of us, they're not into deprivation."

The experiment, the professor notes, was generally useful with one student writing that "a day without electronic media showed me how dependent society and I were upon it. Without that distraction, I can discover new things in the real world, or at least be more productive."

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