Let’s just say… this challenge is almost impossible given today’s standards.
I mean, maybe it’s doable if you weren’t consumed within Google’s ecosystem. But nowadays, it’s almost impossible. You absorb Google services even without knowing it. YouTube? Yeah, that’s under Google’s umbrella. Signing into a website? There’s probably some code that forces a redirect to Google’s servers for authentication. Ads whiles scrolling through articles? Say “hello” to Google’s AdSense Program. It’s impossible to avoid.
To start, avoiding Facebook products was pretty easy. I have not used Facebook for years especially since no one else in my friend circle or family uses Facebook. As for Google products, that was definitely harder than expected. My main source of emails is via Google and since I was expecting important emails throughout this week, or even this month, there was no question that I can’t avoid Gmail. Even if I wasn’t expecting emails, I think I would have still failed the challenge as I would open my Gmail habitually as that’s what I do every single day.
I made an effort to avoid anything YouTube but that’s equally as difficult since digital platforms these days embed YouTube videos within their pages. For example, YouTube videos are embeded onto the page on Reddit threads. Therefore, in order to view the content, there is at least some interaction with the YouTube interface. Like my email situation, I fell to my habits and opened up a YouTube page the second day, binged a couple videos and came to a realization I had failed the challenge.
Looking back, it feels as if people, at least me, are accustomed to going to the internet for their sources of communication, entertainment and news. This is especially hard to avoid when your source of everything, from communication to entertainment, all falls under one company – that single tech giant. Perhaps it would have been much easier if my sources and habits were spread across multiple platforms and sources.
Now I’m thinking I could potentially had avoided Google and complete this challenge if I had planned ahead. For example, since Google is my source of emails, I could possibly setup the email to forward anything for the week to an alternate email under a different company like Yahoo or Microsoft Outlook. YouTube would be a hard one to avoid since they seem to be THE video-sharing platform on anyone’s mind with no contest.
