Longest period of time you went without internet?

[lupinx-Kassman]

Every year I used to go to Spain over the summer and I would stay away from the internet for two months at least. Recently I have only been staying for three weeks though. And of course my family didn't even have internet when I was a little kid.

[Doom Marine]

I can't even go a week without trolling some online forum let alone be off the intarweb.

[40oz]

I once gave up the internet for lent

You kinda lose your dependence on it after a couple weeks. Even after lent was over I waited a few extra days before surfing the web again.

[Doom Marine]

Teen Killed at Chinese Internet Addiction Camp

From SlashDot:

Sixteen-year-old Deng Senshan was tragically beaten to death by three of his instructors in an internet addiction camp in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region of China.

An article in the Wall Street Journal says that, 'China's netizens have played a key role in drawing nationwide attention to recent cases of deaths in prisons and detention centers, so it should be no surprise that they are up in arms over the fate of one of their own.

Many questioned the fairly new diagnosis of "Internet addiction" as a mental disorder.' You may recall electroshock treatment being banned from use on internet addicts in China. According to Xinhua, more than 100 juveniles remain in 'treatment' at the camp, which has stayed open. Perhaps for Senshan it would have been better to let him endure his cruel affliction instead of having his parents pay over $1,000 to have him beaten to death?"

[Technician]

Internet addiction camp? The Chinese can't do anything on the net.

[GreyGhost]

Not if they want to avoid having the shit kicked out of them - which is a rather extreme form of aversion therapy.

[bytor]

I had NO internet access from 2000 to last December! Much of that time was spent in prison. As much as I begged and pleaded for a computer and a phone line all I ever got from the CO's were; "SHUT UP OR YER GOIN' TO THE HOLE!" Now I've been like a kid in a candy store! And what's one of the first things I do? Look for a map editor! Holy shit look what this stuff can do now! I'm still in total awe.

[deathbringer]

PhilibusMo said:

First got a dial up internet connection provided by Freeserve in 1998

Ugh, Freeserve... they managed to make IE HOM. Still it let me invent a new "art" style...
http://www.fagshategod.co.uk/parodies/f_art/

We first got the internet in 1999, using Tesco Internet. After a few tenuous searches for "tifa naked" (me and my brother had seen censored pics in a magazine, but hadn't heard of the word "hentai" yet) i got into the serious business of downloading the Doom shareware. Except the connection was so crap it kept resetting itself and preventing the download from completing.

At the time i had thought (after my mym actually read out the entire licence agreement aloud) that this was because doom was "violent" and the agreement had said not to use the connection for "violence", when actually that was the agreement about the tiny bit of free webspace the account came with.

[Sharessa]

I actually just remembered the time my old computer broke down. I was without internet OR a computer at all for a couple months. I pretty much spent the time working on a D&D campaign. Heh.

[CODOR]

I went 6385 days without Internet once.

In my first year of university I didn't have my own Internet connection, but I could still dial into the school's old Dynix/ptx box and use lynx and pine from there so I suppose that doesn't count.

Aside from that, probably a week or less while camping or at a friend's cottage. And the cottages or any place I might camp have cellular service so these days with Internet-capable phones it's unlikely I'll be without an Internet connection (even if I don't use it, it's there)...

[Ninjalah]

Well seeing as the only thing that i ever do has something to do with the internet... not very long. Maybe like a month and a half when i went on a skating spree, but nope. We had a pretty bitchin' cyber cafe' here in Albany, so i was always 5mins. away from 1000 dollar computers. Too bad it closed shop :(.

[doom2day]

I could stop if I wanted to. I just don't want to.