MY YEAR WITHOUT FACEBOOK

It’s 2017 and as many bloggers do around this time of year, we write about the past year – what kind of things we loved, what we’ve learnt and often some of the experiences that we’ve done. I guess I wanted to do something a little different, and that’s because I made a big change last year, which was to get rid of the social media in my life.

So, I took the axe to Facebook and it taught me a lot. I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with social media, the love of knowing what your friends are doing all the time coupled with the dread of people finding your embarrassing photos or employers finding things from previous nights out that they shouldn’t! When I finally took the plunge, I knew that this time it was going to be for good and that I was going to refuse to look back.

One of the major things that I was battling at the time was the definition between work friends and non-work friends, do I need to make the separation on my online life? Do I need to make sure that they are separate? What if I do something embarrassing and everyone sees it and it gives me a bad reputation? The struggle of those sorts of questions was too much for me to bother with. It was just much easier giving people my number and saying that they can have that and call me if they need me for anything, although I do have a work phone but it’s not used particularly heavily.

The first few months I must admit it was weird, I have been an avid member of Facebook for nearing 10 years (which is scary when you think about it), I remember being introduced back in 2007 by some friends abroad and it felt like I could finally keep in touch with my friends from far-flung places. When everyone started to migrate, it was like you didn’t need people in your real life because they were all immediately accessible through my phone. All my friends were incredibly dubious of my switch because I no longer had any access to the friendship groups online that I had before, but I trusted the fact that my friends would tell me if they were meeting up.

Things I’ve learnt from the axe:

1. People who love you, tell you what’s going on in their lives, rather than relying on finding out on Facebook,
2. When sitting in a café waiting for somebody, reading a book is much more productive and you actually look up every now and then,
3. BBC News is now the app I check when I first wake up, not what my friends did that I missed out on last night,
4. Real friends find other ways of contacting you, such as e-mail or WhatsApp,
5. It’s one less thing to worry about when you see the scary “social media is harming the young” on the news.

Now I look back over the year it was pretty rocky, there were times where I just thought “screw it, I’ll go back and I might actually speak to my friends more often”, but then I thought better of it. I have friends say to me even 9/10 months on that they didn’t realise I didn’t have Facebook which I think sums it all up – if they didn’t realise, then it clearly isn’t as big of a deal than it was before.

I don’t think I’ll be going back anytime soon, I should really waste my time writing more blog posts because I’m awful and patchy. But being away from social media really isn’t the biggest deal in the world – people still get bad photos of my burnt food!