Sarah Coyne is on to something.

The junior class student and some of her classmates at Seneca Valley High School took part in a technology fast — a 24-hour period without cell phones, computers, iPods or social media — in response to a challenge by the Phipps Conservatory in Pittsburgh.

As with any fast, the act of doing without tends to sharpen the senses, alter perspectives and shuffle priorities.

Dana Hadley, the teacher who got her students involved in the contest, said that it was a “tough challenge” for young people who grew up with the technology to go without it. A life filled with digital convenience is the only life they know.

But for Sarah and her classmates, doing without wasn’t the hardest part.

“I came to note a lot of the patterns our generation unintentionally follows resulting in a lack of personal communication skills,” Sarah wrote in an award-winning essay about the experience. “It is hard to imagine a time when technology wasn’t so integrated in our lives.”

Yet every previous generation does remember a time without tech. It was a simpler time when manners mattered and conversation was face-to-face.

An anthropologist once observed that cultures with the most condensed populations have the nicest manners. You can’t swing your arms around when you have no elbow room — in Singapore, you can’t even chew gum. But that theory goes out the window when personal space is supplanted by cyber space. The digital frontier is often a violent bloody place, where disputes are decided by force — or rather, the illusion of force.

What a shock it must have been for these young people when they exited the illusory cyber world and stood completely in the real world, although to be honest, in some respects that world no longer exists either because it’s been forever changed by technology, too.

At least one classmate of Sarah’s found herself going back to the fundamentals: With sudden free time on her hands, she found herself reading her textbooks and reviewing notes she had taken in class.

Imagine that: Falling back to the practical traditions of an earlier era and discovering a confidence in one’s dormant abilities to cope along the way.

That sounds a bit like camping, doesn’t it?