In an age of hyper-connectivity, social media has become an almost permanent fixture in many of our daily lives. According to website Broadband Search, it is estimated that the average person spends roughly 153 minutes per day liking, sharing and posting, with our phones or laptops rarely more than an arms-length away. In fact, in our lifetimes, we will spend over six years on social media – ironically more than triple the amount of time we will spend socialising face to face.
For me personally and like many others, it is unusual that I will go more than a few hours without an obligatory check on my Twitter, Snapchat or Instagram. A harmless five-minute scroll suddenly turns into hours, and once again I find that I have fallen down the social media rabbit hole. So, I opted for the nuclear option, imposing a social media blackout on myself for five days to see how I would cope without my trusty timewasters just a click away.
The first morning, I instinctively reached for my phone and had a moment of confusion when, in my half-awake state, forgot of my purge and was faced with an empty social media folder. This became a trend in my mini experiment – throughout the day, at several points, I would instinctively try to log on to apps that were no longer there. It made me realise how habitual checking Instagram or Snapchat had become for me; much like biting your nails or bouncing your leg, it was a subconscious action that I had become almost oblivious to.
I also noticed how much I used social media as a news source. As a journalism student, I was ashamed when I realised how much I relied on Twitter or Facebook to inform me about what was going on in the world. Over the course of the five days, I instead visited actual news sites and was better informed on current affairs as a result. It was also a relief to not be faced with the usual news commentary of exaggeration and misinformation provided in statuses and tweets. In fact, one of the best things about my blackout was going five days without hearing about the latest antics of Pierce Morgan which often clog my Twitter feed.
As a self-professed procrastinator, social media is my first port of call when I’m looking to divert my attention from looming deadlines and group projects to literally anything else. I wish I could say that deleting my apps made me more focused, but I just got more creative in how I wasted my time. I was maybe slightly less distracted without notifications occasionally popping up, but all that really happened was I swapped Twitter memes for Youtube videos and Snapchat stories for Netflix recommendations.
Not being able to go on social media also made me look up from my phone more and notice just how much everyone has become so invested in the digital world. There were a few incidences where, mid-conversation, the person I was talking with would start scrolling through their phone. It made me realise just how much I do this usually and have since made a more conscious effort to keep my phone in my pocket when spending time with friends and family.
Overall, there weren’t many downsides to my experiment. I missed a few tagged memes on Facebook and some funny conversations in group chats, but I didn’t feel as cut off as I thought I would. And although I have since redownloaded my social media apps, I no longer feel a compulsive need to check them so frequently. It turns out the world doesn’t crumble around you if you don’t share what you had for dinner on Snapchat or like that picture put up by the person you haven’t spoken to since school. Life goes on – it’s nice to look up and see it once in a while.
