Monday, April 1, 2013

A social media experiment, Part 1

Purpose: To analyze the change in lifestyle and behaviour of a young-adult male after 1 week of cutting all ties from the world.

Background: So last Monday I made the hardest decision of my life and deactivated both my Facebook and my Twitter accounts. Now if you know me, you know that I was an avid Social Media user. I used social media as a medium to get my opinions/thoughts/random things nobody needed to know into people's news feeds and timelines.

Now you may be thinking why on earth would I do this to myself. (I like to think of it as social media suicide).

Honestly, I have no clue. I may have just needed a refresher and time to myself, who knows? If you have any ideas why I could have done it please let me know! Like really, comment below. I don't even know who's reading this or if this is even on Facebook or Twitter or who "liked" or "favourited" it so please leave a comment below.

Observations: 

1) I have more time. I normally would come home from work at around 10:30 pm and spend an hour or two trying to catch up on what I missed on Twitter and Facebook during my five hours at work. It would always be pictures of cats and bad jokes on Twitter and useless information about people on Facebook but for some reason I'd still read it night in and night out. But now I usually come home and head straight to bed or read a chapter of a textbook. (More sleep, more productivity = +2 points)

2) Literally 3-4 people made an effort to contact me. Usually if I'm on Facebook or Twitter people are replying/messaging/commenting on what I have to say throughout the day. But ever since I stopped using them only three or four people contacted me. It's only been a week so take what you may from this observation. (+1 just because talking to people who actually want to talk to me make for better conversations)

3) You have more time to actually workout when you're not Tweeting about it. Who knew?! (+1, self-explanatory)

4) Easier to make conversation. Because you don't have play by play updates about your friends via Twitter you can ask them about their day and actually be surprised about something rather than acting surprised because you already saw tweets about it the previous night. (+1)

5) More difficult to make conversation. You can't be like "Oh, I saw you went horseback riding with your pet monkey yesterday on Twitter, how was it?!" This can make for awkward silences(?) and increased frustration with the terrible social skills of this generation. (-1 for awkwardness, and another -1 for the frustration)

Discussion:
Points so far: +3 in favor of keeping social media deactivated.

Overall, it's given me more time to figure out who I am rather than what I want to be perceived as. There isn't anybody I'm trying to impress online anymore. It's just me being me, to myself.

Conclusion:
Tune in next week for week two of my social media suicide stunt.

1 comment:

  1. Great idea. Good to hear it's serving you well.

    ReplyDelete

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