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I blame and bless Yahoo! Answers for my offline adventure this summer.

You may be familiar with the massive project initiated by the giant search pioneer. In this project, any Internet user can ask anyone, anything, anywhere at any time.

No other project in the history of cyberspace, as we have so far experienced it, has enabled the world's morons to answer questions posed by global village idiots. Naturally, I contributed to this collection of anecdotal mishaps and poorly informed opinion. In my defence, they give points for different levels of participation, a device my old-school, Atari-trained psychology finds impossible to resist.

As a result, no interactive experience has shaken my faith in humanity more.

My burgeoning cynicism made one thing clear: Yahoo! Answers was turning me, prematurely into a miserable old fart. This came as a surprise to me. Being female, I always thought I would become calm and correcting with age. Instead, I felt society was going to hell in a hand basket as a personal affront. Clearly, it was time for a break.

Offline, in Bulgaria, and obsessed with technology

I hadn't been away from the Internet for more than a few days in over ten years. Not surprisingly, for the three weeks I was offline over the end of July and mid-August I was obsessed with technology. I spent most of that time with my children in the little village of Gostinia, 15 kilometres South of Lovech in central Bulgaria.

My mother-in-law called Gostinia “the end of the world” and from the windows of out summer house (a/k/a the family ruin), the road out of the village appears to just end and, beyond it, there is only an expanse of forested mountains. I love it, but unlike my mother-in-law, I have never spent the winter there, when heat is generated by wood stove, where warming water is a major exercise in chopping and stoking, where weather and illness confined both my in-laws to this tiny house with an outhouse attached to the barn. I have never been there when the smell of burning wood and coal could overpower.

System failures of a different nature

But I have been there when the running water and the electricity supply have failed. It is not considered a major inconvenience. For generations Bulgarians have honoured their dead by building public wells by the road side and next to forest paths. When the water fails, villagers line up with plastic bottles and handcarts to push the filled vessels home. I've filled our cart with bottles, buckets and children. I've asked my son and his cousin, small as they are, to be responsible for making sure the bucket doesn't tip so that we wouldn't have to repeat this task of waiting and pulling and waiting some more in the heat of the day. I have seen their little faces harden with serious responsibility and been relieved to see that they understood.

I just wanted water for drinking and washing. Dogs, chickens and other household animals have to drink too. Thankfully wells in the woods water the herds when they go out to graze.

Old ways are best insurance

Power is even less important during the long daylight hours of summer. Woodstoves in outdoor summer kitchens cook the white bean soup, bake the stuffed peppers and sterilize the jars and the fruit and vegetables to be preserved. In winter, everyone has a supply of kerosene and their grandparents' lamps with the wicks trimmed and ready – as well as homemade beeswax candles.

Warmth is the most important issue and in Gostinia, villagers fill their woodstoves, grateful that they won't be affected if Russia cuts off delivery of oil or natural gas supplies. They are shocked that other countries might put their trust for something so important on unreliable allies, or even enemies.

But there is no technophobia here. Villagers don't reject new ways. Everyone I meet in the village café asks me about my family and if we keep in touch over the Internet. Instead, everything old is kept as a form of insurance for when (never if) the new system fails.

If only you could search via carrier pigeon

Bulgarian villagers know, only too well, how systems fail.

When Russia reduced its gas deliveries to Italy and cut off the Ukraine last winter, I had to have an epiphany on the subject. When the fuel runs out, no one is going to warn us that it is coming. We'll just wake up in the cold one morning and there will be nothing the utility companies can do to fix it for us.

Do I wish I had kept something from my great-grandparents? Just for insurance?

No.

While I was offline my regret was a wish for knowledge un-obtained. Nothing would have been more appropriate than a search on woodstoves, their use and maintenance.

Perhaps, I could even have learned something at Yahoo! Answers.

Cyberculture researcher and youth media analyst Kate Baggott studies how children and teens use interactive technologies. Her other work includes competitive and strategic research analysis for the interactive industry, and studies of the workplace culture of the Internet and high-tech industries. The author is an independent Canadian consultant working in Frankfurt, Germany.