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Social Media Fasts
By Rosie Perera | September 12, 2010 at 8:15 pm
Dave Parry of AcademHack (blog) wrote a post on Social Media Fasts the other day. His point was that they are a good idea but they shouldn’t be mandated from above. I agree. I prefer the idea of the voluntary week-long Technology Sabbath that students in a couple of dorms at Seattle Pacific University took in 2001 (article).
A friend of mine recently quit Facebook (for a second time) after ten days of posting his “Ten Reasons Why I’m Leaving Facebook.” His reasons were well thought out. They included an admission that he is an addict, a decision to embrace “social poverty” (focus on fewer friends so that he can engage more deeply in those friendships), a choice to wear “one less mask” (we often create a false persona in our Facebook presence; though one of his friends commented that we share aspects of ourselves more universally among all our groups of friends when we share them on Facebook rather than segmenting ourselves; that’s true, but we are more likely to hide aspects that we don’t want to share with everyone, so we’re not truly being real with any subset of our FB friends), the freedom to write more handwritten letters, and the desire to “unclutter” his eye (we are bombarded by images and advertisements all day long; he is right to want to give his brain a rest by abstaining from yet another source of such input). I wish him luck in this second attempt. One friend told him he’d better not do it again as she’s getting tired of re-friending him each time he comes back, and she won’t do it a third time.
I’ve taken breaks from Facebook before, too, though I have never been as drastic as to delete my account. I’ve merely deactivated it for a period of weeks. When you reactivate it, your friend network is restored intact. You’ve missed out on whatever events and status updates happened in your absence, but you’ve also had a break from all the stupid invitations to play FarmVille or pass some meme on to all your friends, hundreds of ads, and whatever else has been sucking up your time. I highly recommend doing this every once in a while. It hasn’t cured my addiction, but it flushes out the garbage from my brain every so often, which is healthy.
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