As soon as I heard about this assignment, I knew I would have trouble staying committed. I wanted to try to go without the Internet, but I knew that going without my cell phone would be next to impossible. Once 5pm on Friday rolled around, you could say I still had my doubts. I walked out of class using my phone and didn't exactly put it down when I was supposed to. But I did check Twitter and Facebook for the last time around 4:30.
To my defense, I was out of town with friends the whole weekend. We went to visit another friend at a different school and we were surprising her for her birthday, so I had to keep in contact with her roommate and her mom. Since I was using my phone for texts and phone calls, I couldn't resist the other temptations that were staring at me in the face. So, as I expected, I didn't stop using my phone. However, since I spend a lot of time on Twitter and Facebook, I didn't check either of those sites the whole weekend. I would say that I failed this assignment miserably had it not been for my commitment to staying off of those two sites.
Surprisingly, my life didn't change drastically without my usual Facebook and Twitter times. Okay that's obviously a dramatization but I really didn't mind it. At first I found it really hard to ignore the little blue bird and white F in the "social" group of apps on my phone. The worst part was that if I ever had a notification, the number would pop up in a bright red bubble. In this sense, social media was staring at me in the face, trying to lure me in. After the first couple hours on Friday, it became easier to ignore. Saturday during the day, once I was with my friends, and since I had already gone a time without Twitter and Facebook, I found that the assignment became incredibly easy.
Then the time finally came. I first opened Twitter on Sunday around 5:10. I was in the car on my way back to Madison (don't worry I wasn't driving) and something very ironic kept happening: Twitter would force quit each time I tried to open it. My newsfeed couldn't handle all of the tweets it had to load so it would just shut down. This might be a stretch, but I found this to be extremely symbolic. When I couldn't access Twitter, it was probably functioning properly; but when I could finally open the application, it refused to let me see any of its content. The way I see it, Twitter was trying to tell me that it is unnecessary to stay connected to social media 24/7. After about five tries, I gave up. And I was fine with it.
Granted, I checked Twitter on my computer as soon as I got back to my dorm room..
Facebook didn't give me any problems, and while I thought I would miss Twitter much more, I found myself going on a Facebook binge as soon as I opened it on my phone. I looked at my friends' new pictures, checked my various groups, read important information from my clubs and from my sorority, and spent too much time reading anything and everything on my newsfeed. It occurred to me that many of the people and organizations that matter most to me at this point in my life contact me via Facebook-that is, more than any other social media site. I slipped a few times throughout the weekend and checked my email, so when I logged in on Sunday it didn't seem to be a drastic change.
All in all, the parts of the assignment that I did follow were not as difficult as I was expecting. I noticed that I check Twitter and Facebook way too much-when I didn't have either of these distractions I was able to do more meaningful and productive things. I spent more time talking to people face-to-face and took more time to appreciate the time I had with my friends from other schools. While I did use the Internet for almost the whole weekend checking the weather, watching Netflix, and occasionally looking at emails, I made a conscious effort to go without the sites I check most often and found it to be easy-even a little satisfying.
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