Giving Up Social Media for a Month

Are social media good or bad for you? I have been pondering this for a while now.  I really enjoy social media, and Twitter in particular.  I often find myself checking Twitter at more or less any time of the day.  If I think of 'bon mot' my first reaction is to tweet it. I enjoy all the great stuff other people stick up as well.  It is also a great way to keep abreast of the news and other interesting things.  I am not a huge fan of Facebook and rarely spend huge amounts of time on it, but even so I still visit it nearly every day to see what is going on.  I also read comments on articles if the article itself is interesting.  I also make comments - it is obviously important to make my own position clear over quite range of areas.  Needless to say I will check back to see if anyone has commented on my comments.


In fact I am so active on all these things that it represents a big commitment of my time. I find that I actually give a lot of attention to coming up with ideas for things to social media (to coin a new verb).  Twitter in particular with its 140 character limit is both a challenge to say something worthwhile in a few words, but easy enough to do in your head while you are doing something else.  I am not sure how much of my limited attention I am giving to it as a proportion, but it must be at least 10%, probably 20% and could even be as high as 30%.   The question is, is it all worth it?

As I say, I do enjoy it.  It also does create a network of people whose help and advice is useful - nowhere near as much as my network of people I actually know in three dimensions, but still real.  I have to say, I don't really know the answer.  If I weren't on social media would I be using my time any better?  Would I have a more satisfying and fulfilling life.  I simply cannot tell.  Social media have slowly crept up on me over such a long period of time that I simply cannot imagine life without them.

So I have decided to do an experiment.  With immediate effect, I am withdrawing from social media for a month.  I won't tweet, I won't post on Facebook and I won't comment on blog posts.  (I will carry on posting things that draw attention to stuff I have posted. Most of these are automated anyway so it would be perverse to turn them off at this stage.)  I'll set up some tweets to warn people who follow me on Twitter what I am doing.  I'll keep a diary of how I feel about it.  On the 6th of September I will decided what my future attitude to social media will be in the light of this experience.

Giving Up Social Media Diary Day 1

And here are the results of the experiment.

Giving up social media for a month the post mortem