Panoptic Society

Today I decided to sit down and have a conversation with my husband about my use of social media. He also unplugged from Facebook and Twitter this week (though it hasn’t been as hard for him as for me). He told me today that he also didn’t realize how much he was on Facebook, and was outraged with himself for wasting so much time on the site. As a result he has decided he will be limiting his own access after this week to checking such sites only once a day. I don’t know if I can make that same commitment, but I do know that I will be cutting way back on how much I use these tools, and when.

For months he has been telling me that I am too deeply involved in Twitter and Facebook, and at one point he had mentioned to me that sometimes he feels as if he is ‘ having a relationship with the back of a computer screen’. Either because I am always working on my school work, or because I am on Twitter, or Facebook. I do spend a lot of time doing both and often either justified why I was spending so much time doing this stuff, or just ignored him completely and hoped he would forget about it.

We’ve often fought over how much time I spend doing school work, other projects, or being on social media. Obviously I can’t just stop doing my schoolwork, or my other projects but perhaps he may be right about social media. Although I use social media for a variety of different things including: school, networking, and managing various projects I am involved in, this doesn’t mean I should be available 24/7. And that is just the problem isn’t it?

In the age of smart phones you can literally do everything on your cell phone. You can check and receive emails, send text messages, and get push Facebook and Twitter notifications (so you don’t even need to open the application to get them). I have 6 different email addresses that get pushed through to my iPhone. Is this something that is necessary? Will my world, or another person’s world fall apart if I don’t answer their email within 5 minutes? Probably not, but the reality is that most of us who have that iPhone, blackberry, or other smart phone do answer our emails, text messages, or other notifications that come through to our phones fairly quickly. I am not really sure if this is a healthy thing to be doing. Everyone needs time away and it would seem too many people have their cyber worlds colliding with their real world and their are no longer any clear boundaries between the two.

I am just looking at the outrageous amount of ‘apps’ I have on my phone and I can do everything. I have an application that allows me to do all my banking from my phone, I have another that would allow me to post and update this blog (seriously, why do I have that?). I’ve got mobile blackboard, an application that allows me to check in with my classes- OK I admit this one has been useful. I have 4 different applications that allow me to use Twitter, about 10 different games that are really good for draining my battery real fast, and a whole bunch of other useless applications that I will probably never use.

Because we can do all these things and more with our smart phones others expect us to be available within minutes. Have you ever sent an email to your professor and got one back right away and noticed on the bottom it says: sent from my iPhone, blackberry (or other device)? Have you then sent them an email at 10 o’clock at night the day before a big essay is due and then gotten all peeved because they never wrote you back. But you know they have a smart phone and you think to yourself: seriously, WTF? Yeah, I know some of you have done that. For those of you not in school perhaps you had a similar experience with your boss, or even just a friend.

I won’t be giving up social media altogether as I use it for many different purposes but this week I have learned that it is OK to take a break from Social Media. My world won’t crumble in upon itself. And even if some of the people I am working on these projects with are freaking out at me on Twitter and Facebook I am not there to see it, and if it was that important you would think they would have sent an email, or you know picked up the phone. So there is no doubt about it I will reexamine how and when I use social media so that it is no longer excessive and so that it won’t get in the way of the important relationships in my life.