Weening Myself off of Social Media for a Day: An Experiment
The constant influx of news, links, status updates and photos is slowly, but surely, wearing me down. It’s changing me as a person. I check my social media feeds as soon as I wake up and force myself to sleep by repeating the same rounds at night. I’m always refreshing my feeds, like a fiend craving another hit.
The fact is: I’ve been active on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram for quite some time. Although these social networks are fun and entertaining (and certainly useful for sharing information and chit-chatting with other professionals), I’ve noticed that the distractive, immediate, and constantly perpetual nature of social media is really starting to eat away at me. It impacts my productivity, sure – but I’m starting to think that, slowly but surely, it’s also impacting my happiness.
So, in an effort to bring about a sense of clarity and focus, I’ve taken a personal vow not to “tweet”, Facebook, or Instagram anything for a total of 24 hours, starting at midnight on Thursday June 20th and ending on midnight of June 21st. If this goes well, I might consider extending my departure to a few days, and so on.
Of course, I’ll still continue to blog and reply to my email correspondences. Really what I’m doing here is opting out of social media for one day. Willingly. Because I want to see how it feels.
Who’s with me?
-Krishna
These beautiful and intelligent people wrote
Tell me what you think!
Jack Beckman
June 20, 2013 at 6:03 amHeh. I have a Twitter account – that I haven’t checked in months, and I think I have sent maybe 5 tweets on. Never had a Facebook account or anything else other than LinkedIn (which I rarely use and am thinking of dropping as well). These things are mostly time-sinks. I actually *see* and *speak* with my real friends – I don’t need the ego boost of 100 “friends” that are some mysterious online presence.
Now, I do see value for people like you, who do a lot of their work over the ‘net, having a presence in all those areas to help stay connected to customers and potential customers. But for the average person? Meh.
Some of my friends tried to convince me I needed to get on Facebook. Why? Because my ex-wife is there and very active! I had to ask them why they thought that was an enticement for me to be on Facebook. I guess they didn’t quite understand the “ex” part.
Arkanabar
June 21, 2013 at 12:22 pmI’ve largely declined to be active in any of this social media. I’m an introvert and find people exhausting.
Also, it presents more attack surface for our surveillance state. wewt, eh?