If you didn’t read my last post, I decided to give up Facebook for an entire week. I did this because I realized that I’ve spent countless hours on the platform, rarely going more than 24 hours without logging in for the past several years of my life. Even though I’ve claimed that I was going to quit Facebook on numerous occasions, I never went through with it. This experiment was a 7-day trial to see what my life would be like without Facebook. And you know what? It wasn’t that bad.
Sure, I felt like I was missing something in my “daily internet routine.” Whenever I fire up my computer, I usually load Twitter, Facebook, and a news site (either Mashable or CNN) all at once. The past week, I’ve really struggled to break that habit. It only took six minutes (yes, six minutes) after giving up Facebook for me to think “oh, I should check XYZ on Facebook” and then I had to stop myself. I realized that many people that I talk with, I ONLY talk with on Facebook. I don’t know their email addresses, I don’t have their phone numbers now that I’m using a British phone, and they aren’t on Twitter. (Why can’t all my friends just join Twitter so I can actually give up Facebook for real!)
I also felt like I was missing important communication for school. My grad school uses Facebook as an official form of communication, often answering student questions or letting us know about events via Facebook, and through no other lines of communication. I almost missed a meeting on Thursday night because it was only written about on Facebook - luckily someone told me about it in person, otherwise I would have never known it existed.
Those few things aside, a week without Facebook wasn’t that bad. I had Twitter to fall back on, and I actually found myself with more time to do things like…make my bed, or focus on other activities. I hope one day that I’m strong enough to give up Facebook for good, but for now, my generation is too reliant on this one method of communication. Until all my friends join Twitter, or I move back to the states and get an American phone number again, I feel locked into Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg has worked his claws into me, and I just can’t shake it off.
