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Woman Goes Three Months Without Social Media, Lives to Tell the Story

by Amar Toor on April 7, 2010 at 06:15 PM

Forget gym memberships or weight loss plans. For her 2010 New Year's Resolution, fiction writer Edan Lepucki decided to do something truly remarkable, and quit both Facebook and Twitter, cold turkey, for three months. As she describes in TheMillions, Lepucki felt like her life needed a serious break from social networking, which, according to her, had become something of an insidious obsession. After notifying her friends, family and fake Facebook friends of her impending sabbatical, Lepucki had someone change her passwords, and didn't look back. Although she admits to not being "Internet savvy," Lepucki claims that the minute she shut the door on her Twitter and Facebook accounts, "the whole Internet seemed to collapse in a second, like the ocean knocking down an elaborate sand castle."

As she progressed, Lepucki found herself searching for new forms of entertainment. An at-home worker, she was initially frightened by the silence of her "Internet family." Even in asbentia, Twitter and Facebook still managed to burrow their way into her psyche, as she soon found herself compiling her own running Twitter feed in her mind. While Lepucki doesn't go so far as to claim that Facebook profiles devalue the concept of individualism, she has discovered an indirect tradeoff. She writes, "The time I spend on these sites means I have less time to write fiction and converse with people in person, two things that make me feel most alive in the world."


Now, three months later, Lepucki is still Twitter and Facebook-free, and claims to be enjoying it. Although many of her peers have expressed interest in going cold turkey themselves, very few have. To the writer, the reason is obvious: the Internet, in her opinion, is simply "a never-ending race to remind others that we're here, that we exist." And although she hopes to return to social networking one day, she also claims to have thus far "enjoyed the injection of mystery and privacy into the world." It's a bit depressing to think that the only real way we'll ever be able to gauge the effect of social media on our lives is by voluntarily detaching ourselves from it. We're not nearly brave enough to do what Lepucki did, but we're definitely glad that someone's out there doing it -- and documenting it as eloquently as she is. [From: TheMillions]

Tags: edan lepucki, EdanLepucki, facebook, health, internetaddiction, psychology, socialnetworking, top, twitter, web

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