Media Fast: The convenience of a broken phone Blog Post 4

In my personal life everyone I know has a cellphone. Like everyone one I have seen walk this campus, that cell phone is a smart phone. Like myself, whenever I see someone on their phone, we are almost never making calls with them, but using them for social media. About a week and half ago I had broken my phone at the gym and it was a total inconvenience, I now no longer could be in constant contact with my friends and family was scared that now if something bad would happen to someone I would be the last to know about it. When this happened I was not informed that the class was about to try and do a media binge and a media fast and my second day without a phone is when I heard it was what we were going to try and do. So I tried to do the media binge just using my laptop for the first two days and then immediately switched to the media fast instead. The media binge was too much information for me to handle. If i had homework I would constantly do it listening to podcasts and watching TV. My roommate who is very political unlike me made me watch the CNN to learn about what is going on in the world when I mentioned the media binge, then because I told him I didn't want to watch a bias new station he told me "well take you pick", and proceeded to change the channel to Fox News. I was shocked how stories I had heard both about the North Korean possible threats to the USA were talked about completely different and didn't know which station to believe. In class I would be on my laptop going through variety of social media and websites where I was shoving my brain with useless information and finally I had to stop. It was horrible. SO i decided to go off the grid. For the next five days I would use my laptop twice everyday. One for a daily dose of minor social media and to send messages to people I needed to contact, and for homework and I would look for responses from the earlier messages I sent. I loved my media fast and it has honestly made me want to get a non smart phone. The reason I believe I was so constantly looking at things on my phone because it is easy to get bored, let your mind wander, and pull out your phone as something to do. But without the phone I realized how little I wanted to go on social media when I had to be on the computer.  Social media has not brought me closer to people I lost, just made me feel connected to them in a synthetic way. I don't like seeing peoples personal opinions on politics, most of my friends on social media I don't actually know and honestly I could care less if I knew about their lives constantly everyday. It does feel weird being out of the loop, but regardless I found the media fast difficult but extremely satisfying. I believe that people should do this all the time and take a break from their screens, read a newspaper, have a discussion with someone over politics instead of reading their opinion on Facebook and commenting something angry, and just let your self breath.  Get off the computer and choose to live. #MORELIFE