For the five-day social
media diet activity, I will be spending the first day logging down all my
social media activities. For the following three days, I will be doing my best
to abstain from using any of the social media platforms that I use on a day-to-day
basis. Throughout this activity, I have come to realize how much of my life
depends on social media. Most importantly I have learnt how society demands the
usage social media. While some people may regard the use of social media as
unhealthy and unbeneficial to society, I would like to think that it presents a
unique means for society to move forward.
Prior to starting
this activity, I first analyzed what social media platforms I was on so that I
could strategize on how I might effectively conduct this social media diet.
While I mostly use Facebook and Twitter, they are mostly tools that inform me
of what’s happening to the people that I know as well as the things that are
happening around the world. Most of the actual communication and conversations
that I have are done through email. Although not a frequent user, I still check
my LinkedIn every now and then.
As committed as I
was to abstaining from using social media for three whole days, it would be
quite difficult to abstain fully. While it would be possible to abstain from
using Facebook and Twitter by disabling the notifications that I receive on my
mobile devices (my Android and iPad) as well as blocking the social media
domain names on Chrome (which is my preferred web browser), I receive over hundreds
of email messages everyday. Most of them being work related that demand almost
instant responses. Therefore my strategy heading into these three days was to
abstain from all social media activity except email.
Not receiving
social media notifications on my mobile devices definitely helped considering
the fact that my primary motivation to log onto social media comes from
receiving these notifications. However I might have overestimated the control
social media had over my life. While I was fairly successful throughout the
first two days, I was not able to last by the end of the third day and so I had
to stop the activity once I got off work. It was the feeling of not knowing
what’s happening around the world as well as not being connected to the things
that are happening around that drove me to break my abstinence. I had no idea
how much anxiety social media has placed onto my life. By the end of the
activity I had over hundreds of Facebook and Twitter notifications, which took
me a very long time to respond to.
While I did feel
a certain amount of guilt as I realized how much time I invested (or wasted as
some may say) into social media while I logged all my social media activity, it
eventually sunk in and subsided towards the end of the day. Now as I reflect
back, I believe that by that point I had unknowingly accepted the fact that
social media was an important part of my life for it is what connected me with
the rest of the world. In that sense there was nothing to be ashamed of. At the
end of the day, social media is the most effective communication platform
between my friends (especially those that are back home in Hong Kong or
studying abroad in Europe) and I.
Thinking about the larger picture, social media is in fact the premier
platform of communication for people of this generation – we just cannot live
without it. While many people argue that social media limits the physical
interaction, which hinders the development of society, I would like to believe
that there is another side to the argument that most people fail to consider.
Almost everybody has a Facebook or Twitter profile. I would like to
think that we are all motivated to have some form of a social media presence
because not only does it inform us of what is happening around the world, it also
broadens our social circle. Social media makes each and every one of us a part
of something bigger than ourselves. People around the world gain utility as
they instantly interact on social media whenever something goes viral, be it
the news of the killing of Osama Bin Laden or some idiot pouring ice on his/her
head for a charitable cause. That would be impossible without social media. So
while it may be true that social media does in fact limit the physical
interaction, it opens up so many unique opportunities that just cannot be found
without social media. That is why I believe today’s society not only encourages
social media usage, it demands that everyone have some form of a social media
presence.
It is opportunities like these that drive globalization around the
world. All this reflecting has made me realized how the anxiety and desperation
that I felt from abstaining from social media is a result of literally being
excommunicated from the world. While I still was able to communicate with those
around me, I was too used to being a part of a greater social circle as well as
being able to reach to a larger group of people. This is a feature that is
unique to social media, which is why it is embraced by this generation as it
serves as the most effective communication platform that we have today.
