Day 4: Digital Detox - What Have I Learned So Far?

Today is Day 4 of my 7-day Digital Detox challenge.  It is going too well.  In fact, I'm enjoying it :-)

Moreover, it seems the universe is making it easy for me.  The internet connection at my workplace is so excruciatingly slow (Anyone still remember dial-up connection "speed"?  Hey, that's an oxymoron right there), while my normally crazy-fast internet connection is having spasms.

Among the list of things that I said I would do while offline, I've done only four so far.  I wrote the draft for a new short story, learned pinyin, gotten more sleep, and spent more time chatting with friends face-to-face.  Actually, it's the last one that I did way more of the last four days over the others.  
Social media has not killed my social life.  In fact, it's kept me more in touch with more friends.  But because I have more offline time now, I filled those up by actually hanging out more often with friends or keeping in touch the old-fashioned way: telebabad, hahaha!

I had forgotten how much fun it was to yak away on the phone, instead of speed-typing on IM windows.  It reminded me how such a phone hogger I was during my high school days that my dad got me my own phone line installed in my room on my 16th birthday.  It was pure joy! :D

Today's digital detox was especially interesting for me.  Remember those lull times that I had mentioned before?  Well, today did not only have lull times; today was a lull day.  But because of the detox, I spent most of the lull time catching up with friends over the phone or by actually hanging out with them, either helping with certain things or just having a good conversation over coffee after a long day (theirs, not mine, haha!).  Surprisingly, I still felt so productive and cheery :-)

This got me to thinking about social media and for what I really use it.  So, tonight, I logged on to Tweetdeck again (after not doing so since Monday) and my other social networking tools.  After reading through most of the feeds, I realized that my social network is made up of 90% news and online services.  The remaining 10% were updates and "shares" or "RTs" from friends.  In short, while I really intended to taper down my use of  social media, what I had really done was detoxify my mind from info overload.  

I was plugged in to too much too often.

I was obsessed with information and learning.  Since being disconnected from my primary sources of goings-on in the world, I'm finding out about some news quite later than I usually do (e.g., I didn't know that there was a strong earthquake & tsunami in Indonesia last Tuesday :-/).  But now I feel that the delay does not make me less socially connected.

There's certainly nothing wrong with keeping connected via the social web.  Staying plugged in has been very beneficial at certain times (e.g., during Ondoy relief operations).

There is a proper time for everything.  I know this, but now I'm relearning it.