Social Media Fast

Twitter is great. My TL is hilarious, informative, and never boring. The followers I interact with are people I have a ton in common with. After a while, Twitter feels like The Mad Teacups ride at Disney World. Fun, then makes you dizzy and your head spin, and you need to get off and recover. For me, I found myself feeling like I needed a break. I started my break Friday morning, and suppose I am ending it now. I've had some time to think during this time. My thoughts are as follows:

While sending out an awesome tweet that gets 20+ RTs is great, it is not nearly as cool as quoting every line of Toy Story 3 with my son. ("Somebody poisoned the waterhole") I love twitter, but my relationships with my family are so much more crucial, and my time distribution has not reflected such over the past few months. Twitter friends are great, but the vast majority won't send you Christmas cards or attend your funeral.

I had a lot of time this weekend. I had time to clean my house, take my kids to the park, and take care of some items on the "to do" list. I also had some great in-game texts with my friends. These would normally be tweets that get buried in the sea of the other 100,000 tweets on my TL that occur during a big Lions game. All of which I would have tried to read.

It is hard to stay off twitter. I moved the icon to the 3rd screen on my phone, and turned off the popups. I found my thumb instinctively going for the part of my screen where the Tweetbot app normally resides. Not sure if this is healthy.

I would recommend a social media fast for anyone who can identify with this, and anyone who spends more time on twitter than with friends/family. I'm still gonna go back to tweeting, but hopefully with better perspective.