Media Binge and Fast

The media binge and fast was definitely a unique experience. Starting out the week with the binge seemed to be the easy part, or so I thought. For the first three days, I did what I normally do, check emails, Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest. On top of that my normal homework load had increased due to dead week, so it was a perfect time to procrastinate more! I was always on Netflix or watching the news videos on my computer. This extra distraction was good at some points throughout the week and awful others. The extreme amount of social media and media, in general, I was on not only made it hard to concentrate but eventually made me want to shut everything down. Now that seems like it should be a good thing, to get away, to experience what this binge and fast was teaching us, but to me, it made me reevaluate what I think is important when it comes to my everyday interactions with social media and technology. Now after three days of immersing myself into as much media as possible, I got the break I needed with the media fast. This was just as hard of a task. Staying off media and technology was easy for the first 5-7 hours, after that it was a chore. The media fast was teaching me to distance myself from what is on the 4-inch screen in my hand and see the world. Fasting was just as difficult as binging was; it’s retraining your brain to know you don’t need the constant gratification of knowing what’s happening. Overall the media binge and fast was a great exercise to see how media shapes our culture and what’s happening in the world.  This experiment made me think of a line from Nanny McPhee (yes, the child’s movie), just with the idea of media.

  

"When we need social media but do not want it, we must binge and learn constantly. When we want social media but do not need it, we must fast and experience the world in front of us."