If you ever want to have a truly humbling experience – take on purging your digital life. Not “unplugging” in the big dramatic sense, but more in the sense of actively cleansing your digital profile. Not with the intention of “never going online again” (obviously not, as I still keep this blog) but with the intention of actively taking control over what you do and interact with online and in social media.
I guarantee you, you will be shocked.
It has taken me three months…THREE…just to even make a dent in clearing out my Facebook profile. It’s terrifying, that every little thing we do on this vast thing called the internet is recorded somewhere .Just because something drops off your visible profile, does not mean it’s gone. I’m still deleting old Farmville posts from my university days. And you have to double delete everything on top of that. Once that was even close to done, I tracked down my old original blog and wiped that out too.
I’m still nowhere near finished. But it’s getting there, slowly.
But it’s opened my eyes to just how much the concept of privacy is an illusion. We rant and rave about it ,and yet we willingly give over our information to sources we don’t control every single day. Whether or not it’s good for us aside (and there are so many studies I’ve read stating just how horrible for our brains it can be, particularly for kids) – how safe is it? How are we just able to blindly trust the figures behind the curtain? And when did we start doing so? It feels like just yesterday that I was thinking extremely hard – even at university age – about posting a single picture online.
In the meantime, this – disconnection – has had active influence on my day to day life. I’m reading more, I’m starting to look at my writing again, I’m sleeping better and completing my craft projects faster. My attention span has stretched – or started to stretch- back out to where it was in theatre school.
It’s interesting…what you start to see when you allow yourself to look up from your screen….
It feels like somehow you’re “living” more. I’m happy for you.