As many of you may know, I’ve drastically limited my time on social media.
Then recently, whilst at home sick with a high fever and flu-like symptoms, I ended up posting on facebook for the first time in nearly a year, which led to me checking back regularly to see if I had any comments. I then would peruse my newsfeed as, being bed bound, I had lots of time on my hands and nowhere to go and no energy to do much more than scroll.
But after a few days, I started to feel down. I can chalk this up in part to being isolated and feeling poorly, which always tends to leave me feeling out of sorts and a little blue.
Yet alongside the familiar sickness-blues was another familiar sensation that I experience from time to time and have come to associate with social media: a sense of being left out, or not belonging, or needing to do more.
Basically, by the end of my illness (and therefore, the end of my social media usage), I found a number of drawbacks to having used it.
Now, I don’t want to suggest that social media is “bad” or that I’m somehow a better person for not using it (hardly). As with a lot of things, there is no inherent value or drawback in the thing itself; it depends on how you use it.
But I did find it interesting, so here is what I’ve learnt following this unintended experiment in the pros and cons of social media. Continue reading “A social media experiment”
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