In the last week of January this year, I made a decision to quit all forms of social media. I stopped using FaceBook, Twitter and LinkedIn. These are the major Social media services in which I was active. An exception was WhatsApp. The reason being the Covid19 induced remote learning. Literally every communication was through WhatsApp. So retained WhatsApp. In WhatsApp too, I stopped updating and viewing Status messages. Now we are in the middle of August. Six months have passed by. This post is about my experience during these six months and what I learned or rather unlearned during this Fasting... Social Media Fasting.
Let me start with narrating, why I took such a decision. It all started with a book titled "Digital Minimalism" by a Prof. Carl Newport. You should also give a try reading this book. Such an impactful book filled with distilled wisdom. This book was not the sole reason for this decision. It was catalysed by certain personal things that were happening in my life at that point in time. So took a decision on one fine morning that, "No social media".
The first thing that I did was to uninstall all the mobile apps of these services. As the tempting notifications in the mobile devices would make it difficult to resist, I uninstalled these Apps. Anyone who wants to put a pause on their social media access, it can be the first and most important step.
The second step was to clear the browser cache so that when you press "F" in the address bar "facebook" would not come. Ofcourse, by search engine suggestions it may come but its better to do "Clear History".
To be frank, once you nullify the notification triggers, you would not feel the loss of anything. The point here is to get yourself occupied with meaningful tasks. This gave lot of "Me time".. the solitude which you would obviously start liking.
The biggest advantage of Social media fasting was this : You wont have the algorithmic thought steering i.e. your thoughts getting triggered towards unnecessary things which otherwise you will never think of.
The most important learning from this period for me was this: "The most precious resource one has is not even the time, but it is the attention". You become that on which you have your attention. The beauty of the most powerful human brain is that, you can have attention on only one thing at a time.. ofcourse attention will jump.. but at a time you can't have two thoughts. Once you remove social media out of scheme of things, now you will have the control over on what you want your attention be.
If you have read upto here, you may have a question why you have started using again? The primary reason is this : As a teacher, my role is to communicate and share ideas and resources with my fellow learners. Obviously social media is the easiest way to do so. But in this second innings I have made some self-imposed restrictions: to disengage from any source of unwanted information, setting a time tag on the social media usage, using it as a motivational tool to complete certain tasks.
One more learning was that Social media is not for week-hearted people. What I mean here is that it can easily influence your actions, your way of thinking, your value systems and the moral compass. The social media pours tons and tons of events from other peoples life by which you are not going to get benefited. So for one using the social media, it has to be taught how powerful are the super computers sitting on the other side of your screen. They can hijack your attention and make you believe anything.
On the unlearning part here is my take away: The meaning of the words such as "Friend", "Follower", "Like", "Influencer" in the social media are not the same as that we learned in the school. They mean different things. The crisis is that when people start merging the meaning of both of these worlds.
Culinary diet is important for the physical fitness The digital diet is important for mental fitness. Every post, every person you follow, you are sharing the most precious resource of your life : Your attention. So be thoughtful on who consumes a part of your life.
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