So it’s been more than three months since I uploaded/updated
anything on my Facebook wall. The last update I’d done was change my profile
picture to what it is currently, and that was on 17th December 2014.
Of course this does not mean I’ve been inactive on FB. I have been visiting my profile
every now and then, and liked a post or two and made a comment here or there. And
I’ve been getting my daily social media “fix” by having conversations on
Whatsapp with close friends and family. But I have not “mass-shared” anything
on my wall or with the people in my friends list now for the better part of a
quarter of a year. (And yes I know FB owns Whatsapp so don’t bite me)
This experiment began when I thought I’d do a sort of
self-discipline check towards the end of last year, when I wanted to see if I could
go more than a week or two without doing much on FB.
In a day and age where it’s second nature (or nowadays even
first nature) for us to share absolutely everything about our lives with
everyone, I thought it would be nice to shut up for a while. You know, not put
up my life on display day after day and share with all and sundry, among other non-sense:
- What I had for breakfast
- How bad the traffic was in the morning
- What I did on the weekend
- What gift I got for my birthday/anniversary/Valentine’s Day etc etc.
- My point of view on whatever was the hot topic of the day (a banned video, a cricket tournament, a state election drama.. etc etc)
- How aw-some/ful my job/office is
- Some random post that I found interesting, when I was supposed to be working at said aw-some/ful job
- Details of my lunch
- How bad the traffic was on my way back home
- What my wife cooked for dinner (or if she didn’t, where we went to eat, what we ate and how it was)
- If I was partying, where I partied and who I partied with
- What I was watching on TV late at night
- How I slept
- What I had for breakfast again….
The pattern had become mind numbing and a bit frustrating. So
I thought, “Let me not do that for a while and see how it feels.”
And it’s been three months since then and I thought it would
be a good time to list down the pros and cons of my little self-imposed
mass-social platform exile.
So here goes…The PROs:
1.
I got
more work done!!
First things first eh? Without a “ding” (or
dong or ting-tong or whatever is your notification tone) every other minute
from my laptop/phone, I focused more on what I was getting paid to do.
2.
No social
anxiety about being “accepted”
Let me be honest. If I post something, I want
a reaction. A like, comment, share, SOMETHING. It’s not a good feeling when you
post something you feel (I reiterate FEEL) is cool, and a few hours later, you
do not find a single reaction to it. But if you’ve not posted anything, BOOM!! Anxiety
GONE..!! Thats a cue for you.. If you're making the effort to read this, do react :)
3. You can be a giver
You get to be the guy/girl in those Tata
Docomo ads, who help give purpose to the compulsive social media butterflies
out there. Because if all you do on FB is make a close ended, congratulatory
comment, or like a post made by someone, you do not expect anything in return.
You feel like a social media Good Samaritan who’s done his good deed for the
day.
4. Life in general gets more real
With no posts, there come no notifications, no
anxiety of not getting them, and more time to have actual interactions with
people who are near you instead of checking every few minutes if you’ve got
notifications. You get more time (at least I did) to read, study, play, work..
LIVE in short.
But yet, not everything about my stay-off was rosy. Some
things sucked. And here they are. The CONs:
1. You miss the attention and the stage
At least initially. From being accustomed
and able to reaching out (albeit online) to hundreds of people at once, to
being confined to a specific contacts list (read Whatsapp) is a big demotion.
Not that the limited Whatsapp interactions were inferior in any way. But you
miss the stage that FB provides to do share whatever the hell you want, to a
large audience. This blog, for example, I do not intend to post on FB. And therefore,
I do not expect it to be read by more than a handful of people. (and that too, after
I force it upon them)
2. You miss those tiny surprises
Let’s face it, an FB post is a big shout
out to whoever is on your friends list. And no matter what crap you post, there
will always be someone who reacts. It may not always be the people you wanted
to react to your post, but someone who you never expected to react. And there is
always a mini-thrill in that. But with no posts, you get no such surprises.
3. When you actually have something
significant to share
Here’s when I get subjective. And I do not
expect many to agree with me. How do you measure the significance of a post or
an update?? I mean, your breakfast, or the party you went to last night may be
as significant to you as the fact that I bought a sportsbike may be to me. When
something significant did happen, not being able to update that on my wall did
make me feel a bit isolated and I almost cracked. (And for the record, I DID
get myself a Ninja 650..in February)
4. You realize just how un-important you are
in the social media scheme of things
This one may not be true for everyone.
Perhaps you have a friends list who would immediately notice your absence from
the updates scene. But for an already sporadic FB user like me, my absence was
hardly noticed. Actually, let me correct that. My absence HAS STILL not been
noticed. Maybe one day, someone will be bored out of their mind enough to check
my profile and ask me “Hey, why so silent?!!” But I won’t hold my breath :)
And there we have it. The PROs and the CONs I discovered of
not being "actively" active on FB. As I said, I don’t plan on posting this on FB since I plan on
keeping my exile going a bit more. At least until the day Whatsapps and Instagrams
do not cure my social itch, and I have to return to FB again like a smoker who
tried to get his fix chewing on those horrible nicotine tablets, but ultimately
had to turn back to the cancer stick..!! :)
