Fast & Binge 8

For this week’s blog, we were asked to media binge for a few days and media fast for a few days, which for some people may be easy or it could have some odd side effects.  I told myself before I even started that I would stick to it as best as I could, because of projects/papers/hw/ tests it might be hard and it could go either way for this experiment. 

            Currently everyone has a phone, tablet, or computer at the tips of their fingers to do whatever they want on the internet.  Walking from class to class its weird because most of the time my phone is in my pocket and I’m listening to music so I look around, people watch, and notice different things on a daily basis.  From my point of view its crazy how many people I see don’t look up from their phones when walking to class, it’s like the beginning of all the people in Wall-E.  Screens in front of faces with none or little interaction with anyone around them.  When it was my turn to finally binge, I took all the things I already noticed before this experiment into consideration.

            I’ll admit it was easy to binge, there are so many ways to just sit and veg out for hours.  To start, times that I would normally put my phone away, I had it out.  I decided to just go with it, so in my classes where I never have my phone out because my teachers call students out for being on it, I of course pulled mine out.  Even though I tried to make it obvious and eye contact was made right when I looked up from my phone they didn’t seem to care the first couple of times, like for the other people that are constantly told to put it away.  Eventually after like the 4^th time being caught I was told to put it away but what I got from it is that I’m sure they noticed that I’m never on my phone so maybe they cut me some slack at first because it’s never been an issue for me. Other times I usually don’t binge on media is at dinner, since I sit with the about the same group of friends every night it’s obvious when something changes.  Basically, immediately after I sat down I was constantly looking at my phone, but it didn’t take long for them to notice and call me out.  Like I said, binging was easy for me for a couple days.  In my free time, I played Xbox when I wanted, sat on my computer for however long, and was running down the battery on my phone like three times a day.  But what I appreciate from this little test the most was the fasting part.

            Normally, I’m extremely distracted by anything and everything when I try to do school work.  Usually, I just deal with everything taking a little longer because I’ll sit on my phone or pick it up when I’m supposed to be doing something. But during the fasting part, I made myself aware of the fact that I wasn’t supposed to be on any type of media. Every time I’d get distracted I’d think about the test and stay on track with what I was doing and honestly just being aware of it really helped me knock out my school work way faster than normal because I wasn’t constantly staying on my phone after I picked up.  It really did make a noticeable different for me during the media fast.

           Ultimately, like anything, I think is okay if you have a grasp on things.  Who cares if you media binge all the time if you’re still getting good grades.  I think the only problem would be if it’s interfering with relationships, grades or people’s safety, like all the chumps who constantly snapchat/text and drive.  Realistically, I don’t normally care what people think about my habits, I’ll usually just try to do what I think is right, sometimes people agree and sometimes they don’t. In the future I think this will help at least a little bit because it showed me I have control over my distractions and can basically stay on track more when I need to.