The Digital Social Suicide Experiment

Over the past few weeks, I immersed myself in a quiet journey going through the days without the thought of feeding my online profiles-particularly Facebook, online messengers, apps and MMORPG hence a digital social suicide test

Why?

I can’t even draw the utmost reason that led me to finally shutting myself out from the online space.  It could be a lot of things like:

• Finding myself in a compulsive cycle every morning realizing I’ve fallen inside a rabbit hole of time suck sifting through news and links that catch my interest.
• Trying to re-live and remember life when I didn’t have Facebook
• Or just trying to change some habits

So how did it start and go?

Within just a few clicks, I deactivated my Facebook.

Stopped going online with my online messengers, games except for Skype which I use for work.

Poof! I was gone.

Then what?

It was quite odd, thinking there might be notifications or messages for you that you shouldn’t miss.

There was always something quite compelling to check Facebook.

Especially when you answered its trick question, “What’s on your mind?”

Or simply want to find out “What’s on your friends’ mind?” or “What do they think what’s on your mind?” tapping on our innate desire to connect and belong by being able to freely express ourselves immediately.

But luckily, Facebook had a timer before you could fully activate your account.  Yay! some encouragement to my experiment.

So what happened next?

• Found myself having more time to sleep and getting up more refreshed
• Had more focus to keep myself busy with the tasks I need to complete within the day
• Received inquiries as to why they can’t find my Facebook profile anymore.
• Actually started to wonder about the people I care about and used SMS and email.

So what happened after?

I reactivated my account after a month since after all, it’s still a convenient way to communicate and organize in groups and see whose birthday is coming up.  It’s still a great communication tool like email with more features.

But there are times I feel that this sort of convenience also made it convenient to stop really caring about each other since everyone assumes people conveniently say what they are up to anyway.

After this experiment I seem to use Facebook less than how I would regularly use it.

Like:

• expressing more than I should which I would often find myself deleting afterwards.  It’s true what they say, don’t decide to do anything except the decision to clear your head when you’re in an emotional state.  Often times you’d find yourself regretting your own words and actions.
• Checking news feeds every hour.
• Check-ins
• Clicking likes – unless I really needed to acknowledge something

Life after

• I felt more peaceful and relaxed
• Felt free from a time draining compulsive habit
• Felt free from the negativity I sometimes feel when I visit Facebook.

Here’s a funny episode from Southpark and how Facebook has changed their lives.

South Park – Facebook episode from malkolm on Vimeo.