Social Media Anonymous – The Good, The Bad and the UGLY!

Since my last post I received a few msgs  from people saying that I should have delved deeper in the subject. I do realise that I kept my distance from the core of the topic but I did so on purpose. First and foremost I have to say that the experiment was a success as far as I’m concerned because I did manage to break away from Facebook entirely and I'm filling up my time with activities I actually like doing. Things that when I look up at the clock make me feel fulfilled and positive that I didn’t let time slip away. My posts have been limited and my interactions with my Facebook friends have been limited too. After 16 days I finished the experiment I only had one chat of about an hour with a close friend from Malta sometime this week.  If you had to ask me if I miss it? I actually don’t. If you ask me if I miss the human interaction I don’t either. Now I don’t want to offend any of my friends and I do love to keep in touch but allow me here to really put to words what my introspective journey have lead me to during that week.

It is very hard for me to write about this without somehow delving into my personal life and essentially it’s the reason why I didn’t write in detail about my findings. In fact it has taken me so long to write the final follow up simply because I didn’t know how to tackle the topic without doing so but because I want to move on with my blog I will try and be creative and move past this stumbling block and finish what I started. 

My social life can be as busy or as quite as I want it to be, I’m in the driving seat! Obviously I hear you say...... but it’s not believe me. My life hasn’t been like that for many years and without dwelling much on it I have to admit that there were phases in my life where Facebook WAS all of my social life.  As my life was morphing and changing I made new friends and rekindled old friendships. I have a phone book full of acquaintances and when I want to I’m just a phone call or msg away from the next experience or adventure. I have to admit that London can be either your Oyster or your Snake Pit in that respect and the only difference is whether you take a leap of faith into life or not. I choose the former because as I always said the world will keep going round and it’s purely my choice if I go round with it or let me drag me.

So here is where I answer all the rhetorical questions I have placed on my last blog. Do I use Facebook to vent my frustrations? Yes!!! I was doing that simply because I knew that there would always be someone willing to listen and comment, which is in itself amazing and comforting but all said and done does it really help? No! Most of the times I was chatting about something privately with friends who like me seemed to have the luxury of time to be on FB for long hours at a time and when I think about it, how much more like me were these people? Were we really helping each other or was it a case of the lame leading the blind? I have to admit that in some though hours I did find help from friends across Europe over chat but there is a fine line between tough hours and forgetting to keep your pace up with the world that will not stop for you.

As I have been discovering very recently very few people can hold my attention for a substantial amount of time. I used to blame myself and think that it’s down to my short attention span but in reality it has got nothing to do with it. There are quite a few people in my life who are very capable of holding my attention for hours and some even for days and I’m pretty sure that by now you are wondering what I’m driving to with this ……. Well it’s very easy; if I was sitting in a pub with a friend or an acquaintance and while talking to them I get this urge to have a peek at Facebook it means that my attention is veering from the discussion which in the end means that my time would have been better spent elsewhere. I know this might not be the nicest thing to say and because my phone is an extension of me I don’t want everyone to think that because I’m sending a text it means that I’m not interested in their company but as I have said before this is a personal journey and like every personal journey there may be some unsavoury parts to it. With that in mind I was simply using Facebook as an escape route from otherwise boring situations which is ironic really because when I think about it Facebook is one of the most boring things ever. Yes I just said it! It is boring because it’s simply mind numbing at best and people keep going back to it like drug addicts keep going back to heroin. Here I apologize to those of you who find this offensive and I guess now you know the other reason why I didn’t write about it in depth the first time round. 

Going back to the element of human interaction – I think these social media tools are precious for human interaction especially for someone like me who has been living away from their own country and family for several years. I can only assure that being able to watch my nephew cut his birthday cake and sing happy birthday to him with the rest of the family when I couldn’t physically be there, was priceless. So I am thankful for the luxury these tools offer yet there is such a fine line between living a life aided by them or hampered by them. 

Once again I want to emphasize that this is a personal journey I am sharing here and that these are my personal thoughts and opinions purely driven from my own experiences and by no means am I trying to insult or hurt anyone.

With the hope that by now I don’t have a haters club, I salute you from my Oyster :-)

Love,

Graziella x

Social Media Anonymus

After a very, very…… very long pause this Malteser is back.  With weeks of almost daily encouragement and inspiration from a hidden super hero I finally decided it’s time to face the fear of that flashing cursor against that vast white blank page and write something.  It’s not the creative writing I should be doing but I’m sure Clark Kent will cut me some slack! Right?

Well the nib is rusty but the ink hasn’t quite dried yet so here we go……………….

An article in the August issue of Psychologies Magazine Entitled “Hold Me close” talked about a study that revealed that 60% of people suffer from anxiety about losing or being separated from their phone.  The article said that it’s stronger in men (70%) than in women (61%). It’s a modern age affliction known as nomophobia. The article suggested that readers should try and turn off their phone for an hour a day and slowly incrementing that time to two hours and if possible more.

I looked up from the magazine, that I was holding in my right hand, to look down at my left hand that was holding my Blackberry. I cannot even hold a magazine with two hands because one of them is holding my phone!!!! it suddenly hit me that I am part of that statistic. Very sadly this blogger makes part of that 61% and frankly it’s not exactly something to be proud of!

My life has seen some drastic changes this year and a by-product of these changes was time! Plenty of free time! Free time Galore! I’m pretty sure it sounds blissful when I say that as soon as I leave the office I’m on my own clock. I can walk down the street as slowly as I want to or get home as late as I want to because I simply can. Unfortunately it’s not something I had planned so I did have a hard time adjusting but there was help at hand in the form of Facebook, Twitter, msn, Gtalk, gmail, Hotmail, WhatsApp and BBM, all of which fit nicely on my Blackberry thank you very much.

My intricate relationship with my phone started thanks to my work e-mail. I have a demanding job and being able to read my e-mails and reply while commuting was a great help, sadly I have to say that started to happen also when I was commuting on a Saturday or Sunday to see friends!  When I started to realise that my phone had much more potential than work e-mails one by one I started downloading apps and the more time I had on my hands the more time I had to talk, chat, bbm, like, comment, upload and yes also google up useless information.  I have become inseparable from my phone!  The article struck a chord and when I discussed the topic with some friends I could tell that my reality was not that far off from theirs. It’s like a highly contagious virus that spreads around very quickly and that is a hard one to kill. When I’m home my laptop is constantly on and most of the time I’m doing pretty much what I do on my Blackberry only on a bigger screen so even if my phone is cast aside I am still doing the same thing. This pretty much tells me that I am not addicted to my phone but that my problem lies with social media.

I will not be exploring the reasons behind this phenomenon, there are a lot of more qualified people doing that already. I simply want to be rid of the addiction and reclaim my life back. I have a lot of important things coming up soon and I know that I cannot let my life be ruled by social media so now it’s the time for me to do something about it.

My name is Graziella and I am a social media addict!

I’m going to use my blog as my Social Media Anonymous. I am going to do exactly what I was told to do in that article but I will be taking it a step further I will also switch off my laptop. I will start by doing it for an hour a day and eventually try to stretch that hour and see how far I can go. I know that just like any addict I will have withdrawal symptoms and that I could easily fall back to the path of wrong doing so I’m going to make sure I have a plan of attack. I am going to make a time table for the week ahead of me. I will plan something to do for that hour every single day and will try to stick to that plan as much as possible. Since I have already made plans to meet some people in the next few days I will make it a point to switch my phone off when I meet them and keep my phone off for at least an hour.  The whole plan is to dedicate that time to doing creative stuff or things that will provide me with inspiration and of course catch up with my reading. 

In a week’s time I will be back here reporting my activities and findings. I think it would be far more interesting if I had to report back on a daily basis but I know that it would be like playing with fire!

So my dear friends wish me luck and watch this space :-)

Love,

G

P.S. Thanks Clark for all the motivational pep talks :-)