I realize that title is a bit sensationalist, but believe it or not, it's actually true. To start things off, let me say that I did not follow through with the entire assignment. I know that for me personally, spending a long amount of time without my phone or computer means complete disconnection. I wouldn't have anything to do. My homework is online, my hobbies are on my computer or need computer assistance, I have no communication methods besides texting and Facebook messaging, and the information for anything else I'd want to do is online as well. So, for my personal assignment, I simply went without my Facebook news feed, Twitter, and Instagram. This may seem small, but it is a large percentage of what I spend my downtime doing. But how did this change my outlook on life overall?
Well, to really get into it, I'd have to dive into some personal issues. Lets just say there's a real good reason I don't want to go on Instagram or Facebook right now. But without this weekend trying not to go on there, I wouldn't have come to the realization that for some reason, social media brings a lot of negativity in my life. I had known for a while that Instagram was driving me insane. Every picture I posted was simply bait for certain people to "like" it, and I would analyze every single like I got on my pictures, trying to determine what it was that caused certain people to like certain pictures. A weekend without Instagram was nice, in that it was less social stress on me, which is the only sort of stress that I ever really truly experience. It was not hard at all to stay off Instagram.
I used FaceBook messaging over the weekend, since it is how I am in contact with the people I'm living with next year. Asking me to give that up for the weekend is nonsensical. I would learn nothing except how to not communicate with people I needed to be communicating with. However, I did try to stay off of my news feed. Due to my computer-use reflexes, I certainly landed on the FaceBook homepage a few times, but I quickly realized what was going on and got off. None of the times that this happened did I notice anything on FaceBook that interested me: The top post was typically an ad by one of the pages I had "liked" in the past, never something from someone I actually knew. I absolutely despise Facebook, and I wish I could delete my account all the way, but sadly it is the only online connection for a lot of UW-related activities and a decent tool for group messaging. It was also not difficult to stay off of my Facebook news feed.
I refrained from Twitter mostly as well, besides checking my connections once to see that my friend Clare had mentioned me and accidental reflexive openings of the Twitter app on my phone. Surprisingly, this also wasn't that difficult to stay away from. I say this is surprising because, as anyone who follows me knows, I tweet a lot. Usually around 10 times a day, if not more. The urge to tweet was there, I can't lie. But the urge to read Twitter was absolutely not there. As soon as our 48-hour period ended, I briefly visited and scrolled through Twitter to determine its value to me going forward, and realized that I sure do read a whole lot of complete garbage on Twitter. In a lot of cases, ignorance really is bliss, and it was nice not even thinking about what people were tweeting for a couple of days.
This is where the whole life-changing aspect comes in. I realized that with all this social media, I sure do spend a lot of time worrying about what other people think. I tweet to try to appeal to people with my humor and opinions, I post Instagram pictures for likes, and I use Facebook... well, I'm really not sure why I use FaceBook, but it probably also has to do with other people. With all this social media in my life, I have no actual identity for myself, just for other people. I'm in a bit of an identity crisis right now, in that I really have no clue what I want to do in life, or even what I care about in life besides my family and hobbies that aren't going to lead to a career, realistically. And social media doesn't help, in that I learn a lot about other people's lives, but barely anything about mine or anything important. So, I'm staying off social media, besides a few features of FaceBook, for a long time. I'm not sure how long this will last, and maybe I'm just delusional and driven a tad insane by the events of the weekend. But I think this might be good for my overall mental health. I want to find out "where I want to go, where I want to be" (Kanye West, 2006), and I think social media and the way I used it was restricting me from finding myself. I might post another blog about this endeavor by the time the semester is over, since this is a pretty relevant journey to take, but overall I hope that if I go back to frequently using Twitter, Instagram, FaceBook, Vine, etc., it will be after I decide something more about my life. So, thanks, stupid LIS 201 assignment. You may have changed my life for the better. Only time will tell.
2 comments:
Devlin,
I think you made some really interesting points in your reflection on the weekend. Though you made some exceptions (for good reason) with some aspects of social media, it looks like the assignment taught you a lot. Just from what you said, it's been making me think about how a lot of what you learned is also true for me in my use of social media. However, in order to truly know if it applies for me, I suppose that I'll have to really give it an effort at some point in the near future (unlike this weekend).
Devlin,
I really enjoyed your response to this assignment. When you said, "social media and the way I used it was restricting me from finding myself", it definitely hit home with me. Oftentimes of social networks, I find myself saying what other people would want me to say (if that makes sense). It's funny because social networks are supposed to be about ourselves, but we often just reflect upon others and lose ourselves in the process.
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