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We are back at 7:42 and this morning we are starting a brand new series called “Could You Do Without?”. First up we are asking could you do without your cell phone, your Blackberry and your e-mail? It is hard to remember life without them, but one brave man agreed to give it all up for one week, but could he succeed?

[Music]

Dennis Kneale begins each day with a cup of coffee, two laptops, a cell phone and his Blackberry.

Dennis Kneale: I live an entirely wired and wireless existence, it is Dennis Kneale. It is Dennis, hi it is Dennis.

As the Managing Editor of Forbes Magazine, he is completely tied to technology.

Dennis Kneale: Staying in touch becomes almost addictive.

With one in eight Americans addicted to the Internet and millions using mobile devices. Could this addict wean himself off technology for a week? We put him to the test, no Internet, email, cell phone or Blackberry, seven long days.

Bruce Upbin: I guarantee in three days I will be crawling up on the floor and curled up in a ball.

Reluctantly he hands over the tools of his trade.

I still got mine, you don’t.

Dennis Kneale: Yes, I don’t.

Good luck.

Dennis Kneale: Thanks you sir. This is going to be a grizzly experience. Listen, I have a crisis, I need email so bad, I just want to know, can we do this week after next?

[Music]

Dennis Kneale: Cell phone is a perfect invention for people who run late. Also, cell phone lets you know the time it is, I  don’t bother wearing a watch but today.

[Music]

Dennis Kneale: Hi, it is Dennis, I don’t have email, you can’t reach me. I don’t have cell phone. I heard that you were miffed, I apologize for that I was running late. I think I might last about three hours. Day one was harder than I thought, especially at the end of the day just felt really uncomfortable to not have that phone. You never know when your little girl is going to call you.

Hi Dad, now we are having lunch, so I am having soup. Call me later, bye.

[Music]

Dennis Kneale: On a subway ride you can do four emails, five emails by the time you come up into the open air, boom, they just szap out there and you have gotten delivered. Now, I got to go find both quarters and a pay phone, now here it is pretty difficult search.

I don’t have any new quarters.

Dennis Kneale: You don’t have quarters? Could I please have a eight quarters, I got make some phone calls. I don’t have a cell phone. Eight quarters, be there for me babe, be there for me. The call you have made requires a coin deposit, I did make a deposit, OK, that’s two quarters now.

Do you really want to talk in that thing?

[Music]

Dennis Kneale: Listen the schedule, OK I got a dinner tonight, I got to call someone else about my credit card was lost, 45 minutes I can’t read this thing, I got to call the art director about a shot for the cover story, all right. Wait a minute I have lost it, I got to call my sitting instead of having to wait.

How do you know it is going on?

Dennis Kneale: I got to call, someone on Silicon Valley, I am dying to grab her cell phone and use it.

[Music]

My six-year-old daughter has my cell phone number memorized, all right. I don’t want to go away for two days and have her not able to reach me. Give me back my – cell phone.

[Music]

Dennis Kneale good morning. It is real, that was not made up.

Dennis Kneale: That was real, right now the ad department for Forbes Magazine is coming over the whole new slogan “Read Forbes, we are edited by Cry Babies”. Yeah that’s truly humiliating, I am so sorry for that.

It is exactly what happened, you are a divorced father of a six-year-old and it freaked you out to think your daughter wouldn’t be able to get in touch with you.

Dennis Kneale: That little girl has my cell phone memorized that number and I have twelve messages from her say that I can listen to her out of town and I want here to know that I am there and in the next morning after that tearful moment when I said “hey, jing-jing tell you what, they kept me two days without the cell phone, I wasn’t able to call her” and she said “I don’t think so”.

She didn’t want any part of it.

Dennis Kneale: Yeah.

So, What was the feeling like Dennis, compare it to something to go without, to be disconnected.

Dennis Kneale: You know what? I think if you were four-years-old, you had a Teddy Bear that you had with you everywhere, it was like suddenly thinking where is my Teddy Bear, it is out of my hands. I had physical symptoms, I had like anxiety, tightness of chest, when I be in a cab running late, I was like a cigarette smoker, who has quit and still bumps cigarettes from friends outside. Asking cab drivers, “can I borrow your cell phone”.

You were like an amputee, you experienced phantom rings. When you actually thought you heard your cell phone rings.

Dennis Kneale: Phantom rings, I kept hearing it. Yeah, exactly and I thought something was, like someone is taunting me, yeah.

You were forced to use pay-phones. Did you use purel after the pay phones?

Dennis Kneale: A friend said to me “pay-phones are like urinals, pay-phones are urinals and yeah it is awful, it is really awful.

There is some people who say “if I try this, I think I will feel liberated”, did you even for a short amount of time feel liberated?

Dennis Kneale: John and I really felt face time baby, human conversation and I can get rid of a lot of just superless communication, wrong. When you cut off your communication you do more than, you cutoff connection and it turns out your friends and your love ones today feel more demanding and if you don’t get back to them instantly, they are missed about it.

Any impact business wise on this, two day period?

Dennis Kneale: Well, sure look I met a great executive who is based in Bangalore, I needed to hook him up with a writer in Hong Kong. There is simply no way to do that today without email, without some type of wireless communications.

Day one, you missed 91 emails, 19 cell phone calls, you bounced two important checks because you weren’t able to manage your online bank account, you did borrow a cell phone from a cab driver to make a call.

Dennis Kneale: Yeah, that’s when I really felt I have hit a low train now, I am in deep trouble.

You are going on vacation with your daughter next month, you are going to take a cell phone and a Blackberry?

Dennis Kneale: You know I just don’t see how I can. I am going to try to leave the Blackberry home, because jing-jing wants me available all the time, but she wants that Blackberry gone.

I think we picked the perfect subject for experiment, Steve adds a nice job on the piece, he is our producer and Dennis described as mean, just plain mean?

Dennis Kneale: He is sadistic.

Dennis Kneale, thanks very much.

Dennis Kneale: Thank you very much.

Tomorrow how one family does living for a whole week without a dishwasher, a vacuum, a washer and dryer, not to mention the personal computer and the TV. We are back right after this.