Media fast/binge

In todays era it seems to be hard to be disconnected from screens. It seems like in todays society people are more connected to screens that what they are to other people. Now every time people are having dinner, or hanging out you see most of them on their phones rather than talking to each other. Media has consumed our lives in some way or another. Media binge and media fast were two activities that were harder than I expected.

            First came the media binge. My first reaction to this was oh yeah this is going to be fun since I don’t do a lot of social media. I only have a twitter account, so I’m not a social media guy.  First day, binging on Twitter wasn’t too bad, but after that since I don’t follow a lot of people it got pretty boring. After getting tired of only looking at my Twitter feed, I turned to Buzzfeed.  This was great for a while, but then I started to realize that some of the articles on there got kind of repetitive. After that I was starting to giving up in the media binge, but then my friend was like “ oh you can use my Netflix account, and oh boy was that the greatest idea ever. I did not get tired of Netflix. However, I had to be a responsible and stop the binge since I had quite a few projects for work that I had to work on. I do think that its interesting how even media binging sometimes can be hard because there is just so much you can see. There is just so much you are willing to read, watch, or listening before it becomes overwhelmed and you stop doing it.

            After that, came the media fasting. I knew this was going to be a bit hard, but I didn’t realize how much harder that was until I started doing it. Media fasting from social media websites, and other websites that serve as a distraction, wasn’t too hard for me since I don’t use them a lot. Media fasting became hard when I had to incorporate my cellphone to the fasting. I mainly use my phone to communicate with friends, family, and my work email. So when it comes to email, I didn’t even try because I have to be sending emails on a daily basis because of my job. I tried to use my phone only for emails.. Yeah that lasted for only one day. I do have to say that during that day I was very productive, and got a lot of stuff done. That day that I was unplugged from my phone I actually went outside and enjoyed the sunset, and since then I have been watching the sunset almost every day. Fasting from my phone was hard because I’m the type of guy that likes to be in constant communication with my family and friends. Whether is through a call, facetime, or snapchat I like to be always communicate with the people that I love. I like to know what they are up to, and how their day was. 

            One thing that I learned form these two activities is that it is nice to be unplugged from all the media once in a while and just enjoy life and relax, but it’s up to us if we want to do that or not and put effort into it. I think media fasting during the summer would be a great idea. This way you would do so much more stuff that you don’t normally do.