Keep Out. Illustration by Claire Lawton.
What happens when the tweets and Facebook updates are turned off for a week? More sleep? Better grades? Insanity? Three of our staff writers took on the challenge to find out…
Kerry LePain
When I first signed on to avoid Facebook for a week, I thought, “This’ll be easy.” I usually put homework off, often until very late at night, because Facebook is so much more appealing. Someone has a new album? A friend posted the new Lady Gaga video? Swearing off the Web site seemed to be a good idea – I was prepared to wage money on the bet that I would be much more productive.
My temporary farewell to my favorite past time ended up being much more difficult than I’d anticipated, not to mention the fact that my hypothesis was dead wrong. I didn’t notice a drop in my procrastination – I just noticed that I was finding new ways to waste my time. Syle.com/vogue, the Sartorialist blog and my e-mail gained appeal very suddenly. I found myself frequenting MTV.com daily to check for new videos that I would post on my profile as soon as my time was over.
I took a trip to Tucson for the weekend, which served as a terrific distraction, but upon returning I found that I’d forgotten my phone at a friend’s house. With no text-messages and no means of communication, Facebook looked even more appealing and finally I gave in.
Facebook has been a part of my life since sophomore year in high school, but I always thought of it as a guilty pleasure, a time waster. I was so far off the mark – Facebook may distract me from homework occasionally, but it provides a social outlet when I don’t have time to meet someone face-to-face. Realistically, my time spent on Facebook is a needed break. I can follow the lives of friends who aren’t nearby, friends who live across the world. Giving up Facebook made me feel so disconnected, but it wasn’t the type of peaceful isolation I feel when hiking in the mountains. Social networking is worth the time it takes. If it still has the negative connotation of frivolity, I’m sure it’s because it still is a relatively new concept. As for my situation, I was back on Facebook four days before I was supposed to be, and I loved it.
Jessica Testa
Forget Facebook. For me, disconnecting from Twitter was the toughest part of my week without social networking.
Think Twitter is all about #pointless and P.Diddy’s over-shares? Think again.
I usually get my breaking news from 140-character tweets (and their attached links) from the 13 varied news organizations I follow on Twitter.
When the campus suicide happened a few weeks ago, The State Press Twitter reported the incident 20 minutes before I got the alert text sent by the ASU Police Department. For journalists (and consumers), social media has played a vital and revolutionary role in providing news immediacy.
If I had been on Twitter last Thursday, I would have learned about the tragedy at Ft. Hood within minutes after the first reports. Instead, I didn’t read the story until 9 p.m. that night, when I happened to be perusing some news Web sites.
I knew then that this was going to be a tough week for me professionally. As a journalist totally tuned into the digital age, I could no longer rely on up-to-the-minute news being delivered straight to me. I would instead need to actually (cue the sarcastic gasps from the generation of journalists before me) seek out my news.
If anything, logging off put social media in a new light for me. Sites like Twitter and Facebook are not just for killing time; they provide information, sometimes frivolous, sometimes constructive — quickly and simply.
Whitney Smith
Out of the three of us, I think I was the last to post my final “sayonara” on Facebook, waiting until precisely 11:59 p.m. to swear off my social networking sites for the week. Initially, I was sure that I would need someone to change my password, lest I be tempted to cheat. But alas, I was surprised to find that once I knew I wasn’t going to let myself sign-in to stalk my friend’s wall posts, pictures and video links, I wasn’t even tempted to!
Suddenly, life before “friending,” 140 characters, and pokes was at my doorstep once more. I basked in the joy of actually being productive while on my computer, instead of sitting down to do homework and realizing, an hour and a half later, that I’d been involuntarily sucked into updating my profile and checking out profiles the entire time and hadn’t gotten a single thing done.
If there was one thing I missed that I feel cell phones and e-mails don’t provide, it was being able to find new people I’d met and reconnect with old friends. I slammed my laptop down in frustration when I wasn’t allowed to log on to Facebook to find a cute guy I met at a coffee shop, and again when I needed to get the e-mail address of an acquaintance I wanted to interview. And needless to say, there were a few times I felt a bit left out of the loop, when friends mentioned events I hadn’t heard of (”Hey, are you going to that dinner this Sunday?”) and remembered after seeing my blank stare back that I wasn’t allowed to view my invites.
The days of being sucked into social networking instead of being productive probably aren’t over for me, but at least I know I can live without news feeds and status updates. You don’t have to waste away your time on these sites: use them to your advantage and then log off and meet people in real life.
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