In addition to the usual trinity of resolutions* I have decided to give up social media entirely for the month of January.
I’m going to blog about this experience, although given I
won’t be able to publicise it, you probably won’t be reading this until the
experiment is over.
I am a regular user of Twitter and Facebook. I don’t use
anything else except LinkedIn (to publicise a few work-related things). Having
decided to abstain pretty much at the last moment, I’ve not done the numbers on
how much of my time social media takes up. It tends not to be big runs of time
– but it will be a few minutes, several times a day. Certainly more than an
hour a day and probably more than two.
Some quick calculations suggest I tweet
about 150 times a month. But I spend a lot
time using both as a news/information source; Twitter through the people
I follow and Facebook through pages I like (The Guardian, NPR etc) and which
find their way to the top of my news feed. Not all that time is going to be
saved, particularly if just I find myself on the Guardian App rather than
pulling down articles via Facebook.
Why am I doing this?
Firstly there is that classic ‘alcohol-free month’ approach
– just proving to myself that I can stop any time I want. Honest.
Secondly I don’t have a lot of free time and I’d like to
think there are better things for me to be doing with it. I’ll try and cover
what these might be, and how I get on with them, in future posts.
Third, I am increasingly aware (thanks to the likes of
Michael Gove telling me) that I live in a bubble of comfortable ‘metropolitan
elitism’ where the news that is curated for me on social media reinforces my
existing views. This of course happens with many of the people I meet in real
life, but I tend to be far less likely to be involved in political discussions
there, and it is much harder to avoid human social interaction. I could have
chosen to source my news from Breitbart and the Daily Express for the next
month to try and rectify this, but that’s just too painful to seriously
contemplate. So this is an attempt to, if not step out of the bubble, at least
try to spend a bit less time inflating it.
Finally, the world over the last year or so has been a
pretty rubbish place to live. (I mean this in a general sense – my own life has been really good in 2015/6.)
Stepping back from the hate and worry for a month feels like a nice break.
That’s the plan, and 16 hours into the New Year I’m still
sticking with it. I’ll post in a couple of days on how things are going.
If you have any views on this, feel free to Tweet me at
@rossofpenge. Just don’t expect a reply before February.
* exercise, alcohol and smoking
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