Travels without internet

Back to usual

Yang returned to Taiyuan on April 9. His mother welcomed him with a bowl of noodles in accordance with the Chinese saying "Dumplings for departure, and noodles for return".With the noodles warming his belly, Yang felt that his journey had come to an end.

When he first saw his phone and computer, which had been lying unused for more than four months, he didn't want to turn them on, because he had become used to a quiet, peaceful life without the internet.

A week later, he relented, knowing that it is difficult to live completely cut off.

Setting aside a day to deal with all the messages he expected to find on his phone, Yang switched it on and waited for an hour but not a single message appeared, not from WeChat, social media platform Sina Weibo, or even from Alipay. When he'd left the internet behind, the online world seemed to have abandoned him, too.

Later, he found out that in China, if a recipient doesn't open a message within 72 hours, it is gone forever.

"The messages that I would never see left me with the somewhat regretful feeling that I had missed something. But upon further reflection, there was nothing to miss," Yang says.

His old life soon returned. During a recent 90-minute trip from Nanjing to Shanghai by high-speed train, he spent most of the time choosing a hotel on his phone, comparing prices on different apps only to realize that his choice was no difference to the hotels he'd picked randomly during his phoneless journey.

A book, No Mobile: A Happy Excursion Against the Digital Leviathan, will be coming out next year and he is busy making a documentary about his journey.

"I hope to offer a different perspective on seeing the world, whether on screen or through my words," Yang says.

With the internet influencing every aspect of life, Yang seeks to use his experiment to prompt greater reflection on the eternal connectivity of the modern world.