Communications students in Mara Adelman's Seattle University "restorative solitude" class recently underwent a four-day media diet. This meant no cell phones, no radios, no e-mail, Web-surfing, instant messaging, text messaging or television for four days.

The media diet was originally supposed to last a week, according to a Seattle Times article, but each of the dozen students in the class cheated to some extent, even when the experiment was reduced to four days.

The purpose of Adelman's restorative solitude course is to help students get in touch with the creativity that stems from personal private time.

What the experiment showed was that today's students' lives are so frenzied that they are not able to take a timeout to think or reflect. It also shows how dependent our society has become on communication via technology.

The reaction Adelman's students had to the diet were varied, but all agreed it was harder than anticipated. "The silence was deafening," one said in the Times article. Another student discovered a possible car problem when she turned off her car radio for the first time in who knows how long.

Most of the students also found that they had much more free time once they made a commitment to ignore their media devices.

The media diet these students went through holds lessons for all college students, including those of us at the UW.

While today's society has become too dependent upon technology to swear it off entirely, as these students discovered, it is important to remember that constant access to Facebook or a cell phone is not a matter of life and death.

For those of us who cannot imagine turning off the TV for even one day, it might be prudent to consider keeping a log of our media consumption, as Adelman's students did, to discover how big a role media plays in our lives.

Or better yet, try your own media diet for a day or two, to reconnect with the silence that is no longer heard.