Vladimir Rakhmanin | Deputy Online Editor
I convinced myself I wasn’t addicted. I kept making excuses – anything from ‘I need to keep up with last minute exam tips on the Law class group’ to ‘I need it to keep in touch with my friends who live abroad’. In reality, though, I was swept away, alongside millions of others, into the abyss of social networking. For our internet-savvy generation, keeping a tab with Facebook open while doing other things on the internet has become extremely commonplace – as a result, many of us are taking part in social networking constantly throughout the day. It was because the activity had become such a necessity that I decided to stop – I think part of me just wanted to know if I could do it, to know that I wasn’t completely enslaved to Zuckerberg’s brilliant creation. And so, exactly seven days ago, I left a message on my timeline informing everyone of my experiment and logged out.
The first couple of days were rough. As they say, the days after you quit a bad habit are the most difficult, and I found this out the hard way. Every thirty minutes or so I felt the pull, the incessant voice at the back of my head telling me to log on, to see what’s going on. I found that the easiest way to counter this was to focus my attention on the activity at hand. Before, I would often have Facebook open on my laptop while watching TV, or playing guitar – without this constant distraction (and it is a distraction, no matter what you tell yourself) I got a lot more enjoyment out of my hobbies.
After a while, the pull subsided – I began to think about Facebook less and less. One of the most positive outcomes of this was the amount of work I managed to get done. I think I got through more college work over the past week than I had over the entirety of last term – It really is astonishing. Facebook often becomes a portal to procrastination – when you ‘quickly take a look’ at the link your friend sent you while at the library, you often spend as much as an hour trudging through related videos and articles. With this danger out of the picture, I was free to actually work in the library, with no clear justification for procrastination.
One of the things that I did miss, however, was being able to look at my ‘events’ tab and instantly being able to know what’s happening around college. It’s really amazing how quickly college societies had embraced social media – this is extremely convenient, as otherwise you have to rely on word of mouth and the posters around campus. Maybe it’s a sign that the internet has made me lazy, but I really did notice the absence of this feature, and it’s something that I’m looking forward to using once I go back online.
This is probably a given, but it’s also very difficult to contact people without Facebook. Say what you will, but e-mails are always way more formal than a standard Facebook message – even without this awkward change of tone, people just don’t respond to e-mails as quickly as they do to Facebook messages. Organising UT projects, such as the weekly podcast, became so unwieldy that I didn’t even bother – in this sense, this whole experience has made me realise just how helpful the service is when trying to operate in today’s fast-paced world.
As I log on to Facebook once again, for the first time in a week, and trudge through the 60+ notifications that I received while I was away (most of them being from Law Soc promoting their events in assorted groups – thanks a lot, guys), I think back on this experiment. In a way, I was glad to be able to be free from the mad rush to keep up with what’s going on, to get work done, and to be able to fully focus on whatever it was I was doing. Even so, I am relieved that I’m able to get back online, and continue to use the service in ways that will benefit me. Say what you will, if you are involved in any sort of major organisation, you have to take part in social networking – and this, I think, is the most important thing that I learned over the past week, be it for better or for worse.
