Recently I’ve stumbled across several digital Sabbath projects. The Foresters Tech Timeout, which I wrote about recently, is one; Mother London’s No Internet Week is another. An older one, which I confess I just discovered, is analog Sunday, which “no email, no blog reading, no surfing the web, actually, no internet, no typing, in fact, no computer at all and no tv.

Most recently, I recently came across the Hibernate project (it’s where I found the service that my book’s Web site is now hosted on). It’s trying to get 10,000 people to sign up for its e-fast pledge, a 24-hour break from email.

Hibernate a brainchild of entrepreneur and explorer Ben Keene, who seems to be a kind of Web 2.0 Ranulph Fiennes. He explained at the end of last year why he started this:

And as a result of the weariness of the journey to inbox zero and the distraction trap…I find it difficult to differentiate between binging on online content like a never-ending conveyer belt of fast-food that just looks and smells so good that I just don’t know what might come out of the kitchen next, so I’ll hang around a little longer AND surfing the wonderful web and discovering some of my favorite things in the world.

I’ve tried plugins like Momentum and it helps, but only a little. I want to be more focused and have as healthy a tech diet as I do with the food I eat.

While he’s rather more the adventurer than some of the people I interviewed in the book, otherwise Keene is pretty typical of people who decide to start a practice like this: technical, busy, and looking for a way not to unplug completely but to restore some balance in their lives.

While it’s possible to practice a digital Sabbath in a way that turns it into “conspicuous non-consumption” and a badge of moral superiority or elitism (as Laura Portwood-Stacer put it), any beneficial or noble or altruistic practice– yoga, parenting, going to church, saving money, dieting, running marathons, meditating, being super-busy at work– can become an performance of moral superiority. Arguing that digital Sabbaths, or hibernation, or analog Sundays,or other practices are mainly declarations of one’s authenticity or superiority misses the point, and warps the intentions of the practitioners.