July 11, 2011, 4:47 PM —
I was recently chatting with a fellow at work who told me that he was in the midst of a colon cleansing. For two weeks he wasn't drinking booze, eating meat or otherwise abusing his innards in an effort to purge his body of all sorts of gunky stuff. He never felt more alive, he said -- or sounded more insane, I thought.
When he told me this, I smiled, nodded and wished him a speedy recovery from the head trauma he had clearly suffered and then I got back to tweeting about how gassy my lunch had made me.
A couple of days later, while taking a break from posting pictures of my recently deceased cat's post mortem paw prints to Flickr, I found this Pew Internet study on how social media affects our lives. The following quote caught my eye:
Some worry that as a result of using these services, people may become more isolated and substitute less meaningful relations for real social support.
Wow - social media use can be a bad thing? That made me wonder: do I have a problem with social media?
Well, let's see: I have my personal Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Flickr, YouTube and LinkedIn accounts, two work accounts I tweet from and the corporate Tumblr account I maintain. I rarely go more than five waking minutes without tweeting about the crappy Boston weather, posting unflattering pictures of myself or checking the Facebook statuses of vague high school acquaintances to see what they had for lunch. Finally, my wife recently interrupted my tweeting to ask me pick our daughters up from school and I responded with, "We have daughters?"
Clearly, I realized, I was in need of SMA (social media anonymous).
So, I decided to give myself a social media colonic. I'd go one whole week without social media to (a) see if I could even do it and (b) reconnect with my family or, at a minimum, remember their names. I would do no updating or checking of Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Flickr, YouTube or LinkedIn, for work or personal use, Basic online necessities like email, web browsing and pornography downloading would, of course, still be allowed.
After enjoying one last Sunday night social media orgy, I posted what would be my final social media update for one whole week:
Realizing that my social media system would be getting flushed out first thing in the morning, I climbed into bed, silently wept myself to sleep, and hoped the morning would never dawn.
But dawn it did, and here's how it all went down...
Monday (day 1)
7:30am - My first day without social media goes absolutely flawlessly -- until I get on the train to go to work. Unable to goof around on Facebook on my iPhone, I'm forced to fake sleep as a way to avoid eye contact with my fellow commuters. Gonne be a long one.
8:35am - Five minutes into my work day, I'm in desperate need of a break. I find myself checking the news by going directly to web sites, rather than reading it on Twitter -- just like they did in colonial times.
9:15am - Unable to express my irritation via Twitter with the overhead air conditioner that's buzzing loudly, I feel weak, powerless and oddly crampy.
10:20am - Last night Lebron James and the Miami Heat lost NBA finals to the Dallas Mavericks. I, unfortunately, am unable to read the Twitter and Facebook chatter about this major event, which means it may as well not have happened. Depression begins to set in, as you can plainly see.
10:51am - Now getting the shakes from social media withdrawal; it could also be from too much coffee.
12:30pm - I try to fill the void in my soul with a turkey sandwich (heavy on the jalapenos). After an initial burst of elation, (possibly due to the jalapenos) the tryptophan kicks in and I'm now sad and tired.
