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Paul Miller, a technology blogger, is trying life without the Internet for a year.

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

(CNN) -- Maybe it seems like the fastest way for a gadget-and-technology blogger to commit career suicide, but Paul Miller gave up the Internet at midnight Tuesday.

Miller, who was and still is a senior editor at a tech news site called The Verge, plans to stay offline for a full year. When he needs to post something to the website that employs him, he will hand his editors a thumb drive with his stories saved in offline files. If he needs to look up a phone number, he'll get on the phone and start calling people -- who hopefully know people who know the person that he's trying to reach for an interview. There's no other way without access to professional websites and directories, he said.

"I'm going to try to use the six degrees of separation a little bit," he said on Tuesday afternoon in an interview -- by phone, of course. "I have a lot of co-workers and they know a lot of people and so anybody I can get a phone number for I'll call that person and maybe they have a phone number for another person. So I'll have to follow that sort of chain."

Why go to all this trouble? For years, the idea of a digital sabbatical has appealed to the hyper-connected set -- people who spend most of their days in front of computer screens, checking blogs, reading Twitter and somehow trying to figure out how to get their work done in between. At the office, they dodge dozens of click-me-now messages per minute, each demanding instant attention.

Even away from work, phones chime and vibrate to the point that, according to a market research study from Martin Lindstrom, the buzz of a vibrating phone is now one of the top three "most powerful, affecting sounds" -- after a baby giggling and the Intel chime, he wrote in The New York Times.

Depending on your perspective, it may be either surprising or fitting that a technology blogger would get so caught up in the online tornado that he would quit, completely, and for a full year.

On one hand, the Internet is Miller's passion and livelihood.

"I love the Internet," he said. "It allows people to interact in really deep and meaningful ways and to create awesome things and do awesome things. I think it's a wonderful invention and I have no ill will against it."

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Prominent blogger: 'I'm leaving the Internet for a year'