Mother London, one of those branding / marketing / design / media consultancies that’s so hip it’s impossible to tell what they actually do (but they have offices in London, New York and Buenos Aires, so they must do it well) recently pulled the plug on five people for a week. Or more specifically, they got give people to go offline for a week and record the experience. As the Web site explains,

[I]t’s the annual occurrence of Internet Week that made us think– have we become addicted to the internet? And if we have, what would happen if 5 digital natives were forced to go cold turkey for a week? Would it be reminiscent of a scene from Trainspotting? Or would they regress to some kind of IRL utopia?

The result is this documentary.

NO INTERNET WEEK: FULL DOCUMENTARY from Mother on Vimeo.

I like the fact that their definition of “digital natives” was not the simple anyone-under-X-years, but rather various people who because of work or social life spend a lot of time online. Too often commentators will assume that there’s an unbridgeable demographic chasm in digital life. The notion that anyone over 40 (or 50 or 60) can’t possibly get Web 2.0, and that anyone under 20 can’t communicate except through screens, is lazy and incorrect: it doesn’t allow for the fact that, say, Steve Jobs came up with the iPhone and iPad is 50s, that Doug Engelbart was still working on augmenting human intelligence in his 80s, and that younger Baby Boomers like me have spent most of our lives around computers.

And as an American, I appreciate the tasting menu of accents presented by the five subjects in the video, too. I know that’s shallow, but there it is.