The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Wired Campus blog writes about Freedom today:
Fred Stutzman, a Ph.D. student and teaching fellow at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s School of Information and Library Science, may not have had Rousseau in mind when he created the “Freedom” application. But he does believe that to escape the siren song of social media, scholars might need to freely impose restrictions on themselves. “When there’s wireless everywhere,” he told The Chronicle, “how do we really escape the Internet?”
Mr. Stutzman’s answer is to relinquish one’s right to surf the Web to the supervision of a sort of robotic schoolmarm. Freedom is a shareware application that users instruct to disable their computers’ network adapters for a fixed period of time, leaving them unable to browse the Internet for up to eight hours.
Mr. Stutzman created Freedom as a tool for researchers and writers such as himself who, like many Internet users, have become so restless that they must exile themselves from cyberspace in order to concentrate on their work. “As a doctoral student, it’s something that we’re all familiar with,” he said. “Anybody who needs to do long writing or Internet research … it’s hard to draw the line between work and time-wasting.”
Freedom’s current version is 0.4.1, and you can download it here for free (thanks to iBiblio for the hosting!). I also enjoy reading feedback or feature requests on blogs and Twitter, or you can email me privately. Windows users, I’m sorry, but there are no plans to develop a Windows version.
Fred Stutzman is a doctoral student, researcher and teaching fellow at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's School of Information and Library Science. He studies how people use social media.
Freedom is great. It makes life as an Internet-distracted student so much more productive.