Social Media - The Digital Appendage in our Lives



(graphic courtsey Il Borgo di Ostuni Stress Anxiety Relaxation, relax, angle, text png)


One of the offers, or challenge, in my graduate class this week on Web 2.0 based learning and performance was to go offline from all social media for 24-48 hours.  Piece of cake, I thought!  More time for chilling, catching up with friends, do some stuff around the house, try getting the cat to stop over-grooming and creating bald patches of fur...you know, the usual stuff.  After all, I get up at dawn regularly and cycle for about an hour before eating.  It can't be harder than that! 

Wrong!  What I realized...barely an hour into this misadventure...was that I have a severe attraction to social media.  It is not an obsession, though.  Just a severe attraction.   And this cold-turkey withdrawal from Web 2.0 made me realize how much it has become an integral part of my existence, of me, of who I am and how I live my life.  

It took a couple hours for the severity of this exercise to kick in.  "Oh, I wonder if my daughter posted info on the release date of the documentary she produced!"  I grabbed the phone to check her Instagram account, then quickly dropped it like I'd picked up a hot poker.  But 15 minutes later, I'm thinking "Were there any new challenges posted today for the class?  I'll check the class blog and Twitter feed."   Again, I grab the phone, then quickly tossed it to the other end of the couch.  This went on a few more times when I wanted to check Facebook on a photographer I follow who is posting images during his photography expedition through Arizona, and when I was going to scan Twitter for updates on the news.

Then I was done.  In about two hours, the anxiety waned and I had reprogrammed my mind that I was free of both this need and responsibility of social media.  So I made changes.  I did more classwork and research, started reading a book I've wanted to read for a while, dropped off stuff at the Goodwill, and just lived my life without social media.  And I survived!

For me, balance is everything, so it was no wonder I found this experiment both exhilarating and unnerving.  It was great to have the extra time, freed attention and focus to do other things and be productive in other ways. On the flip, it was unsettling that I could not get immediate answers to questions or things I was interested in...an admission that technology and Web 2.0 has become a deeply engrained part of my life.  Like Will Smith's character in the movie I,Robot who had one arm that looked exactly like the other, but when the skin on that arm was peeled back, you saw it was a robotic, AI-run, digitally mechanized appendage that was actually much stronger than his natural arm.  In the same way, social media is the powerful, ever-present digital appendage in our lives.    

In all, I stuck to my guns. I have 4 hours to go, and haven't cheated!  Nor will I.  I can't wait to see what I've missed when times up, put I also really enjoyed reading my book last night (a time when I normally catch up on social media), and I already have 2 more books in queue.  A challenge that let me re-balance.


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