Last week the BBC shadowed three students at Bournemouth University who went 24 hours without television, radio, the internet or any other form of media.

The experiment, called Unplugged, is part of a global collaboration launched during the’4th Salzburg Academy on Media & Global Change, which is supported by the Knight Foundation. As a result, students from across Europe, Asia, Africa, North and South America all went a day with no media contact, except books and landline telephones.

Unplugged first started at the University of Maryland in April when 200 students went “unplugged” for one day. The study found that most of the students were unable to last one day without media links to the world.

The Salzburg grant ‘is one of several the foundation is doing in the area of digital and media literacy. According to’the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy, these’literacies are now’critical’to ensure that’all individuals can fully participate in their communities and in the wider democracy.

Other Knight grants’that focus on digital and media literacy include the News Literacy program at Stony Brook University, the Globaloria Civics Track in West Virginia and the 21st Century Literacy project based out of Palo Alto High School.