Touch Grass: What If Providing Access to the Offline World Isn’t the Answer?

“Go and touch some grass.”

If you spend enough time online, you have probably seen some version of this phrase. Someone posts an opinion that is too intense or just a little too online. Someone else replies: go outside and touch grass.

Nothing wrong with that right? Log off, go outside and reconnect with the real world. Anyone who’s swiped for hours will get the appeal.

There is even a new digital wellbeing service in Aotearoa New Zealand called Touchgrass, which explains the phrase as “what your mates say when you need to log off and get back to real life.” The service supports rangatahi (young people) experiencing difficulties with screen use, gaming and gambling through online resources, mentoring and counselling.

Clearly, grass has some work to do.

Most days, in fact. I am a gardener. One might even say I have green fingers.

On the face of it, I love me some grass. A good day is when I can touch it! But touching grass is a bit more complicated than its internet reputation suggests.

Sure, grass can be soft, and it can smell terrific after it’s been mowed. It also gives me a rash. And boy, is the spring pollen setting off my allergies at the moment.

Then there are the prickles hiding in it, leaving me with splinters that won’t come out until I do the dishes. Some grasses are wiry, scratchy or sharp. I wouldn’t describe touching them as calming or pleasant.

Of course, grass ain't that bad! But it does give you a clue about mainstream digital wellbeing advice. The “outside” of digital wellbeing tends to look suspiciously idyllic: fresh air, bare feet, sunlight and lots of grass. Perhaps a paperback under a tree. Definitely no notifications.

This is an imagined place beyond digital life: authentic, embodied, natural and apparently accessible to anybody willing to put their phone down. Touching grass has never felt so inviting. That invitation also assumes there is somewhere nearby, welcoming and free to go.

But what if there is no separate world to return to? Nathan Jurgenson calls this separation of online and offline digital dualism. Young people’s friendships and social expectations do not stop at the edge of a screen. Providing somewhere to go without a phone can be valuable, but it does not leave those relationships behind.

The crip technoscience manifesto, yet again, offers some answers. Developed by Aimi Hamraie and Kelly Fritsch, it takes seriously how disabled people remake technological worlds rather than simply fit into them. Its commitment to “access as friction” challenges the tidy story of identifying a barrier, removing it and declaring the problem solved.

Instead, Hamraie and Fritsch call for non-compliance. Consider wheelchair users adding spikes to push handles to stop strangers moving their chair without permission. Rather than accept unwanted help, they change the technology to make consent a condition of access. Access is not simply something benevolently given, but something people can reshape on their own terms.

If people can reshape the terms of access, why not the terms of disconnection? Social media age restrictions, phone-free schools and movements to delay smartphones offer different responses to digital life, but their preferred destination can look pretty similar: fewer screens, more independent play, a return to the “real world”. What room does this leave for other ways of disconnecting?

There are good reasons to support independent play, public space and breaks from digital life. But providing these opportunities should not mean prescribing how people use them. People might adapt them, combine them with digital connections, or prefer something else.

Our Screen Space Defacer and Cosy Charger explore other possibilities: making digital environments more fidget friendly, or making disconnection an act of care.

We might call these experiments in non-compliant disconnection: not simply entering the offline world on offer, but reshaping what a break from connectivity can be. There is no reason it should look like a neatly maintained lawn.

Touching grass? Sometimes, I'd rather let it grow.