My Facebook fast

Well, I "fasted" from Facebook for three days. I chose Facebook because I've found it to be the most immediate and wide-reaching way of keeping in touch with the greatest number of people around the world, including my family and friends in Australia. In my (ahem) 42 years of life I currently have 766 friends. I think it is too many ...

I have struggled with taking a looooong time to "check" Facebook during the day as so many people post so many things. I've managed to block a lot of silly updates like "Joe Bloggs changed his profile picture" and "Mary Jane invited you to play Diamond Pet-ville" by using F.B. Purity, and by limiting status updates of everyone to "only important" so that I don't get 58 pictures of kittens every day. But it still takes a long time to check things and I feel a certain anxiety that something important will happen and I won't know about it. This is why I decided to give up Facebook.

I don't have any funny stories of singing along to Jose Jose or listening to other people's weird conversations during my fast, but I must say that for all my thinking that I didn't have enough time to do everything I need to do in these days, I managed to concentrate more on my work and get things done faster. I realised too that the world goes on, and important things have other ways of being communicated.

I also realised, after reading the Amish article, that the telephone does tend to make us jump to attention over anything else happening. I had some important people round to lunch a few days ago and we were just about to sit down to eat, when the phone rang. Everyone looked at me to see if I'd answer it. I was tempted to, but decided that it was for this specific purpose that we'd bought a phone with an answering machine. If it was important, they'd leave a message. And we enjoyed a lovely hot lunch with our guests.

I think it was a useful experiment and a way of measuring whether the technology we use is a tool in our hands, or if we have become tools of it. It helps us realise that we can decide the limits that we place on the technology we use, and that there are other things that we can do in life that perhaps we'd forgotten about. If everyone did this, perhaps we would, in a way, "wake up" from our technology-induced dream while sitting on a bus or in the subway and see people, listen to them, and even begin caring more for them.