Friday, April 20, 2012

social networking hiatus update


letterpress print by La Farme

It's been a little over a month since I cut out twitter, tumblr and instagram, so I thought I'd give a little update on how it's going. I don't miss tumblr. at. all. I haven't had the slightest twitch to log on. I even removed it from my bookmarks, because I have no intention of ever going back.

I'm slowly starting to use instagram again, simply because I realized I was taking a lot less photos since I stopped. Still a lot of random cat photos, but not so many daily snippets of my life and I miss that. I think as long as I limit the amount of time I spend perusing my feed, and restrict myself from posting photos when I'm supposed to be enjoying time with my family, it won't disrupt my life or eat up as much time as it did before.

And twitter. Oh, twitter. I'm so torn. It's been so refreshing this past month to finally have a break from 3 years of oversharing. I dyed my hair, my cats did funny things, I watched good movies, I had a terrible sales slump, my brother passed his driving test and they're installing a drive-thru at my local Panera -- but I didn't feel the urge to tweet about any of it. I just enjoyed (or in the case of the sales slump, hated) things as they were happening and that was it.

But I really miss my twitter-only friends. It wasn't until I quit that I realized how many people I only talked to on twitter! (Although part of me is nervous to log back on because I'm pretty sure nobody will have even noticed my absence lol) I'm considering checking in once a week, chatting a bit with friends, retweeting some awesome Mental Floss facts and catching up on Neil DeGrasse Tyson's awesome twitter feed. I'm really not sure if I'll go back, but after this month I'm positive that if I do, it will be much more limited. I won't keep a twitter app on my desktop, and I doubt I'll check the feed more than once a day. I've really enjoyed being a little detached. Life has felt slower, and it's been really nice :)