Apart from my 6 month blogging absence here at notesfromspain.com, I also avoided almost all interaction with Twitter and Facebook.
I would occasionally log in to both to post news of new updates at notesinspanish.com, our Spanish learning site, (as well as my personal Twitter we have a NIS FB page and Twitter account), but this almost felt like it wasn’t ‘playing the game’ – using FB and Twitter as a service to publish news without being ‘social’.
Now I’ve been dipping my toes back in the FB and Twitter water, and have come to the following conclusions.
1. Both services are a huge distraction to getting any real work done – and I have minimal time to work as it is!
2. Twitter is much better for getting news, and for getting pointed to interesting stuff going on around the net, but it’s also a place to get pointed to an awful lot of stuff you just don’t need to know about at all, ever.
3. It is kind of nice when Facebook tells you what an old friend is up to.
4. When I use twitter (mostly via the Mac’s Twitter App), and follow links from there around the web, my blood pressure rises very quickly – so I’m not sure Twitter is good for my health!
5. My life was not in any way poorer for not being engaged with these services for 6 months. Therefore, I could give them up again, but the fact that EVERYONE is now in there, and that they form such a firm part of the fabric of the net, will probably keep drawing me back every now and again. FB is winning over Twitter though, as the distraction factor is lower, and it doesn’t make my blood pressure go up so much.
6. As a wise person once told me, you have to give something up to really understand it, and what it does to you. He was talking about wine, though I think there are parallels with the long term effects of Social Media!
Notes from Spain by Ben Curtis 