A week without social networking.

Along with many, many others I've just finished participating in a week long experiment aimed at helping to answer the question: is it possible to avoid social media in the modern world. This has meant not using any Social Network for five days. Yep no Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google+ or forum based website. Unfortunately, it also extended to no pages where commenting exists. A surprising effect was that this meant no news websites.

I went into this thinking it'd be a breeze, it'd be simple. Oh how wrong I was. At first I sat at my computer joyfully writing with no distractions. I was limited to viewing such a small collection of websites that it just wasn't worth browsing.

Of course later, it got more difficult. I sat down to watch TV and realised that where I would usually pick up my Nexus 7, doing so would make this more difficult. You see everything about our modern smart phones and tablets is integrated (especially on Android OS) all our social networks, all our contacts, all of our hard earned information. Don't worry though, I'm not going to start blabbing on about how information is dangerous and all the big companies don't let us have privacy. I did have to disconnect all the services and accounts that I'd connected to my tablet. Just when I thought I'd got all of them a friend Facebook messaged me. It immediately popped up on my tablets home screen. An unavoidable bit of social networking had got through the net. I contacted the team running the experiment but they simply told me not to worry and to carry on. Apparently slips like mine were a vital part of the data they were collecting.

What these past few days have taught me if anything is not that these services we use are frivolous, but actually that they are extremely useful. I know, believe me I know. You're sitting there going 'duh', but before this week I seriously thought that I wouldn't miss social networks or their like. The fact is though its not that simple. Here's a few of the thoughts that I've had about our communications and usage of Social Media.

Sites like Facebook, while being a serious invasion on your privacy, allow people to be more private in a way. I've never been comfortable asking for people's phone numbers. I've always assumed that if I needed a person's number or they wanted me to have it they'd give it to me. We so often see our phone numbers as private information to be controlled. With Facebook though we are able to provide people with a simple link that gives them as much, or as little information as we want them to have. There is a downside to this though. If we come across something we want to share we used to call (or perhaps text) the information, but what if we don't have that person's phone number or email address? Well it's not really possible. Of course that's a relatively minor problem often the information might be cool or interesting to your friend but ultimately, it's no great loss if they don't get it.

'Some of the information I share IS important' I hear you scream. Of course it is. Huge congratulations are owed to a friend who got engaged recently. Now that is something that I wouldn't of heard about for quite a while. Let's face it, that's a BIG life event, and naturally, I wanted to text and congratulate the couple. It got me thinking though. Previous girlfriends I've been in relationships with have taken the relationship status on Facebook with a severity I've long been perplexed by. Quite frankly to me a relationship is no less real because my status is hidden. Yet with so many different kinds of life events I've spoken to people who've said that it felt 'more real' (or in one unforgivable case 'more realer') once they'd told the Facebook and Twitter world about their event.

Maybe then social networks only have the value we place in them?

Well, I'd say yes if it weren't for the likes of Google+. I know, I'm sounding odd now. Not many people in the UK use G+. Personally I love it. Where it can be difficult and tiring to trawl Facebook or the internet in general for (writing, theatre, sci-fi, special interest) communities, Google+ makes it lot easier. As a result I've missed tons of news that I'd otherwise have read.

Likewise Twitter is often the first place I hear about jobs. Okay, I don't see that many vacancies appear, but I do hear about them there.

My point? I guess I don't have one, but I will say that for everyone who might moan or otherwise get irritated with it, there's a mountain of reasons why social media has now become so important. Sure a lot of it comes down to convenience, but if it wasn't so useful, we wouldn't keep using it would we?