But...my family is just as guilty. When we were at the beach a few weeks ago, my mom walked into the room and started laughing. Me and both of my aunts were all sitting side by side on a couch and yep, you guessed it. On our iPhone. Two of us were checking Twitter (my 66 yr old aunt! on Twitter!) and the other was looking at face book. Oh my how times have changed.
When my friends and I were visiting NYC, me and one of my friends were constantly taking pictures and then uploading them to Facebook or Twitter. Or Instagram. Whatever. We were either looking up taking a photo, or looking down posting them. Her sister wasn't doing this, and made the comment that if you spend your entire trip taking photos, you aren't experiencing the moments. You are just trying to capture them.
I know I'm not the only one who does this. The other day when I was out to said brunch below, a girl came up to me and asked me to take a pic of her and her boyfriend. They got together and acted all lovey-dovey for the photo. After I took the picture, I watched her sit down and proceed to (I'm assuming) do the same thing that we all do - upload it to Facebook. Her and her boyfriend were both on their iPhone, and didn't even look up at each other for at least another 10-15 minutes. No communicating at all. Just...Facebooking. Go out to any restaurant and look at everyone sitting up at the bar. You'll see a bunch of people who used to talk to each other, now looking at their phones.
The bottom line is that social media is stealing my time. It's taking huge chunks out of my life. Out of my experiences. It's taking over my life. And I really want to stop it.
But it's hard. It's not just social media, like Facebook and Twitter, sucking my time. I log my food into my iPhone on my fitness pal. As I mentioned earlier, I play Words with Friends. I use the Notes app to keep grocery lists. I use Nike Plus to log my runs. I check email, pinterest, and pay my bills on my iPhone. And then there is the normal phone stuff like texting. I can't lie..this may or may not be me more than a few times....
My goal for the next month or so is to stay off my phone when I'm out with friends or family. Conversate more. Tweet less. Pay attention when someone is talking to me. Unplug. Live my life. Because these moments are going by faster than ever before. Because at the end of the day, I don't want my life defined by a status update on Facebook.
7 comments:
Please don't leave me! I will miss you. I will track you down. Sure, tweeting takes time, but so does spending time with your IRL friends. Bahahaha. On a serious note, you are correct; it takes time. But, doesn't all love take time? ;)
Wow I was justing talking to someone about how very little I interact on social media sites. I'll pop on Twitter once every so often & I don't have a FB account. It's just not my thing - I like to keep under the radar so to speak. I tried to have a blog but found that a little too invasive so I ditched that.
Anyways, maybe participating actively in social sites can cause a person to do more & try more things than they otherwise would do in order to be topical & hip? Who the heck is gonna post day after day - I'm a work. I'm back home. I'm at work. I'm back home. yawn.
I'm probably introverted in that I don't need to be surrounded by people or know what's going on at all times & I kinda dig that. It's kinda freeing to not have the responsibility to keep up with the rest of the "world".
I strive to let go of social media every day and it keeps winning! Watching people on their phones and not paying attention to the people they are with bothers me so much, yet, I find myself doing the same thing. At least we are aware of it. I feel sorry for the young generation who really won't know any better.
I quit FB so I got a TON of time back from just doing that.
I hear you 1000%. I've been trying to get better at not checking into Twitter/FB during the day/when I get home, but it's hard! And I never want my fiance to think that social media is more important than him.
It definitely requires a degree of discipline to tune out. One of the things I've done lately is purge my list (friends/group) on FB and delete people I don't know on both FB/Twitter. Just by doing that, i reduce the amount of time on those pages.
Even using the phone to call is becoming an acient task. It's all "texting" now. I have one of those old school phones, so for me to text takes FOREVER...11111 4444 6666 ..you get the drift. I've being trying to get into my friends heads that they need to CALL me, that it will be faster and get the results they want sooner, then texting me 5 messages for every one I can text back.
Argh.
I LOVE LOVE LOVE this and totally agree! Facebook makes me so mad most of the time that I am close to deleting it. I do enjoy Twitter and get so much motivation from those that I follow...including YOU! I go through spells where I'll come home and intentionally leave my iPhone in the other room. If it's beside me, I am constantly picking it up. Bryan picks at me about how much my face is in my phone. I am going to try and give up FB so I'll have time for texting and tweeting...but only when I'm not in the company of family/friends. So if anything important happens and I need to know, SOMEONE TEXT ME! :-)
I totally agree with this. And i need to work on it too.
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