A class of two hundred students at the University of Maryland, College Park, took on this very assignment. They were challenged to go without media for a full 24 hours on a day of their choice between February 24 – March 4, 2010—a time span that coincidentally included the Vancouver Olympics and a significant earthquake in Chile.

After going for 24 hours without media—whether they chose a weekday or a day over the weekend to be media-abstinent—they were instructed to write a blog about their experience.

The assignment to students was simple:

This week your assignment is to find a 24-hour period during which you can pledge to give up all use of media: no Internet, no newspapers or magazines, no TV, no cell phones, no iPod, no music or movies, etc. And definitely no Facebook. Although you may need to use the Internet for homework or work, try to pick a time when you can go without using it. This should be an interesting experience for you and examining your own dependencies, so really try to give yourself a chance to do the whole 24 hours. You will write a post about your experiences. Feel free to do some outside research on the effects of Internet or cell phone dependence and share those links with your fellow students. If you do NOT make it the full 24 hours, be honest about it. How long did you make it? What happened? What do you think it means about you?

Following the assignment, the two hundred students wrote over 110,000 words about their experience.

According to the ICMPA and students at the Phillip Merrill College of Journalism, these were the highlights of the study:

Students use literal terms of addiction to characterize their dependence on media.

“Although I started the day feeling good, I noticed my mood started to change around noon. I started to feel isolated and lonely. I received several phone calls that I could not answer,” wrote one student. “By 2:00 pm. I began to feel the urgent need to check my email, and even thought of a million ideas of why I had to. I felt like a person on a deserted island…. I noticed physically, that I began to fidget, as if I was addicted to my iPod and other media devices, and maybe I am.” Read the entire entry here:

The majority of published comments from students reflected on how disconnected they felt from friends and family—and from their “community”—when they were “unplugged.”

Students hate going without media. In their world, going without media, means going without their friends and family.

“Texting and IM-ing my friends gives me a constant feeling of comfort,” wrote one student. “When I did not have those two luxuries, I felt quite alone and secluded from my life. Although I go to a school with thousands of students, the fact that I was not able to communicate with anyone via technology was almost unbearable.” Read the entire entry here:

Students show no significant loyalty to a news program, news personality or even news platform. Students have only a casual relationship to the originators of news, and in fact don’t make fine distinctions between news and more personal information. They get news in a disaggregated way, often via friends.

“Although I will admit I do not actively keep up with breaking news every day I do get a lot of information on a daily basis through social networking, text messaging, and websites such as Gmail, where it does have headlines on the homepage. It is very important to me to have some sense of what is going on in the world on a daily basis, but I also focus in on issues that I do care about, and I keep up with that particular issues progress. For example, the Equal Rights campaign, or local and global environmental organizations, whose progress I follow via Twitter, Facebook or their websites.” Read the entire entry here:

Notice that tools like Gmail are now giving people news information by including headlines in the marginal ad-space on the page—empowering users to get information quickly while on their way to something more personally relevant.

18-21 year old college students are constantly texting and on Facebook—with calling and email distant seconds as ways of staying in touch, especially with friends.

Said one student,”Texting and Facebook allow me to make plans to meet up and act socially, whereas without these two devices I had no easy way of making plans unless I happened to run into the person I wanted to do something with.” Read the entire entry here:

Students could live without their TVs and the newspaper, but they can’t survive without their iPods.

“It was really hard for me to go without listening to my iPod during the day because it’s kind of my way to zone out of everything and everyone when I walk to class. It gets my mind right. Listening to music before I go to class or take an exam is my way of getting amped up like a football player before a game. It sounds weird but music really helps to set my mood or fix my mood and without it I had to rely on other people to keep me in a good mood,” said one student.

Clearly, this study would show that the media industry is growing and attracting addicted fans. The question for your company is this: are you one of the outlets your fans can’t go for 24 hours without? Do you deliver something remarkable every day? Or, are you forgettable?