Media Binge/ Fast

The media binge wasn’t that hard for me to take on. On a normal day, I wake up to my alarm – which is on my phone – and quickly browse my social media’s before taking a shower. When I get back to my room, then I scroll through every post on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, you name it. For the binge, I always had my phone in my hand. I constantly scrolled through social media, opening every link and clicking on everyone’s profile, just to soak in the experience. After a while, it got really boring. I don’t recommend that someone just sit on Facebook for fun and keep scrolling up, trying to see if new content has been posted.

In the good nature of binging on media, I also watched multiple movies and documentaries on Netflix, while browsing at useless content on my phone. It got to the point where I had Netflix open on half of my computer screen, with another window open on the other half, while I was also on my phone. That gave me a headache. I’m not normally the person to binge watch TV shows so it was kind of a struggle to sit through an entire 90 minute documentary and not shut it off, but I triumphed through it.

I’m not going to lie, the media fast was a struggle. The only thing that I used my phone for during the fast was for my alarm in the morning, otherwise if I had it on me I tried my best to keep it off. When I did my homework that required me to use a computer, I had to restrain from “taking a break” after five minutes and wasting time on sites like Tumblr and YouTube. I found that it was easier to focus on my homework when my phone wasn’t right next to me.  I had more free time to do other things besides lay on my bed and watch videos that I’ve seen already.

One thing that was mentioned in class was that we aren’t really that busy when we put down our media and focus on what we have to get done. The fast made me realize that I have a lot more time on my hands when I’m not on my phone 24/7, or taking a break from homework to check Facebook or Twitter. Binging on media is sort of a normal thing nowadays, and I never really thought of how unhealthy it is until I experienced going from extremely connected to extremely disconnected. This experience was very eye opening and showed me the importance of balancing my time spent with technology, and how different my life is when I’m not connected via online media 24/7.