For Lent this year, I decided to abstain from going on any social media sites (such as facebook, twitter, tumblr to name a few). I even posted about it here. Well, did I actually follow through? Did I actually not go on any of the before mentioned sites not even for a little sneaky peek? Hmm....
I did not. I have to tell you the first day was kinda tough because it had become my habit to check these sites A LOT. I was committed to not do it. It helped that my husband had also decided to give up the same sites for his own reasons. The only thing I really missed from not checking facebook was the updates from family that don't live close by. I found that even my family that does live near me would be talking about things on facebook and I would feel totally out of the loop. I also missed not seeing photos of new babies and of friend's children.
When I did return to facebook (Easter night), my first order of business was to scale it back. I had started to "like" a bunch of companies, etc. in the hopes of winning giveaways, which caused my news feed to literally become clogged and overrun by junk. The status updates I wanted to read from family and friends would quickly become lost amongst the latest sale going on at Walgreens or Old Navy or even another blog's giveaway. So that night I started to purge and unlike. If your company/blog, etc. were eating up my feed, you were gone or "unliked". My reasoning being that if I didn't miss you during those past forty days, I probably won't miss you in the future.
I haven't gotten to this point with twitter yet. Probably because I haven't been on twitter as long and don't have as many family/friends on it as well. Also, on twitter you are able to form lists so to categorize different people you are following. Therefore I just check my lists to see the tweets of the people I really care to read.
So if you are considering taking a break from social media, I say go for it! It really helped me to refocus on my blog and other things that I am interested in like ... reading a book. (What a concept!)
Most importantly through my small sacrifice, Miss M was inspired to also give up something near and dear to her heart. Her (fake) iPod. I didn't even know she had done this until one day she said, "When I see Mommy on Facebook, I know I can go on my iPod." And since she didn't see me on Facebook, she kept her promise as well. Success for all.
PS. Happy Birthday to my dear friend, Colleen, who doesn't need a social media site to tell her that she rocks!
