Day One: Coming off the social network crack

I’ve taken Twitter out of my Outlook, Facebook off my Firefox, and both applications out of my Blackberry. I am going Cold Turkey 2.0. For the next seven days, social networks are dead to me. I expect to start shaking soon, get intense cravings by 4pm and feelings of doubt as to my mental state by the end of the day. Why do it? Why not. But put succinctly into a list, I’d say because…

1. I’d like to stop my internal monologue restricting itself to 140 characters. I used to think semi-big thoughts. Now, I cut out pretty much any word over 5 letters long, and ‘Susi is…’ seems to feature heavily.

2. Down with banality. There’s no reason that anyone should be interested in the minutia of my life, and I should probably stop doing this like pouring a drink over myself and immediately thinking ‘I must Twitter that’ (I totally poured a drink over myself yesterday).

3. Focus. I check Twitter for other people’s updates as much as I use it for my own, but it’s leading me down the path of ADHD. Outwit delivers updates into a folder in my Outlook, and as someone who can’t abide seeing the little blue ‘unread’ number next to any folder, I find myself checking it every three minutes. Who knows – I might actually be able to focus on something for more than three minutes at a time.

4. I want to see how difficult it is for other people. So far today, I’ve had three emails through Facebook from people who have my personal email. There’s entire days worth of conversations between myself and people sitting not three metres away from me on Twitter. It’s about time we all started using our words.

And because every list has to come in multiples of five…

5. Because last night, I uttered the words ‘I’d rather go a week of not drinking than a week without Twitter and Facebook’. I am taking that sentence to a psychoanalyst/Google presently, but in the meantime, I’m sworn off social networks for the next seven days. I am *so* going to need alcohol.