A little over halfway through, I’m feeling pretty blah about this exercise. It’s a success in the sense that I haven’t been on any of the sites I used to spend time on for the past four days, but I can’t say I’ve gotten much extra work done in the meantime. The main goal, though, is not to get more done during this week, but to strengthen my self-discipline in the future. A worthwhile goal, that, but hard to measure.

Quitting social media for a week has left me feeling disconnected and out of the loop. I’m completely cut off from my internet friends and people-I-follow, and I miss the casual chit-chat with my real-life friends, even the ones I see regularly in person.

Facebook and Twitter, for me at least, are all about being brief, witty, and shallow, and instead I find myself here on my blog, writing long, boring sentences analyzing the meaning of social media in my life. Gross.

If I do something like this again, I’m going to make it more like “only check Facebook once a day for a week.” It’s not actually interacting with people online that’s a waste of time, it’s keeping the site open and flipping over to check on it every time a new post appears.

Anyway, here are some of the things I considered posting to Facebook or Twitter today:

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You know who else super-awesome has a Twitter account? Besides Carol Hannah, I mean. Stephen Motherfucking Hawking. Oh yes. Probably the most brilliant living physicist is on Twitter. He talks about the TV shows he likes to watch.

Damn, I love living in the future.

In related news, I’ve heard from a few people that Foursquare is the new Twitter. Really? So far I don’t understand the appeal, but apparently Twitter is hard to the get the hang of at first, too, so I’m sticking with it for a while. I’m getting my first smart phone tomorrow (squee!), so maybe that’ll liven it up a bit. Right now it seems more like Stalker’s Little Helper than anything else.