In “Facebook went offline this week. Experts say we should log out, too,” CNN reporter Francesca Giuliani-Hoffman discusses Facebook’s brief outage and the psychological effects of social media on digital habits and our ability to build meaningful relationships.
When Facebook, Instagram, and other social media platforms went dark, therapist John Duffy described his patients as feeling relieved. Some of his clients spend four or more hours a day on social media, so the forced digital detox was a welcome change. As the article says, there are a lot of Americans suffering from digital addiction, and last week’s episode illuminated just how many of us are more dependent on technology than we’d like to be.
I’m not one of those people that’s all over social media, but, at this point, I don’t think I could completely stay away from it either. There is so much that happens now online that it would be hard to keep up with some of my friends and their interests if I was completely away. On the other hand, I also see the value in doing a digital detox and believe that I benefitted from doing one myself.
This post really resonated with me, as I also found myself slightly relieved. For the first 30 minutes, I was a little panicked and shocked but then reminded myself that this was happening to everyone on a global scale. Going an entire day, or at least a few hours, without the distraction of social media made me a lot more present in the world and the outage was honestly very refreshing. It’s crazy to me that a social media outage is the only thing that allowed for people to become more present in the world, and I realized that I need to utilize the ability to detox from the platforms more often.