week10.html

<title> CS349 Spring 2019: Robert McInvale</title>
<h1 style = "font-size:300%;"><b> Robert McInvale CS 349 Blog</h1></b>
<h2 style = "font-size:200%;">Week 10 - Social Media</h1></b>

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I have never used social media on a regular basis. My current Facebook profile is home to exactly one post (made on the day of the last presidential election) and exactly one album, uploaded because my phone was running out of space. I’ve joined a couple of facebook groups in the past, but the only time I have ever participated in one was when my cat ran away and I needed help finding him. I have never tweeted, grammed, snapchatted, or participated in any of the other many forms of social media aside from my nominal involvement with facebook. Granted, I was born and grew up in an era before social media existed, but I’m somewhat proud of my abstinence from what I see as a poisonous, confidence-crushing system of faux social interaction and I have no intention of changing.
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I know that I am hardly unique in disliking social media, but I strongly believe that my life is better without it. Don’t get me wrong - technology has vastly improved my life, and I would be a miserable wreck without it. I have a small group of friends that I keep in close contact with every day through chat clients and messenger apps, and maintaining those relationships would be utterly impossible without such tools, considering the frequency with which I have moved. However, I don’t need to log on every day to see pictures of the food they’ve eaten, hear about the weird and unique thing that happened on the way to work, or browse through the music they’ve recently been listening to, and I don’t likewise need to share any of my own activities with hundreds of acquaintances for some reason. I know enough about my friends’ daily lives through simply talking to them daily, and if I miss out on minor events or opinions in their lives because I didn’t catch them on twitter, I’ve done just fine so far with that hole in my knowledge.
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Perhaps my lack of involvement on social media means that I have fewer friends and connections than I otherwise might, and perhaps that lack makes me a weaker participant in the social and work worlds. By not participating, however, it’s speculated that I sleep better, have better and more frequent in-person interactions, have less anxiety, have less of a “fear of missing out,” am more likely to exercise regularly, and am more likely to engage in other, non-social-media activities.<sup>1</sup> As a fairly intense introvert, any of those sounds like reason enough to me.


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<sup>1</sup><a href="https://www.self.com/story/does-going-on-a-social-media-cleanse-actually-do-anything-for-your-mental-health">https://www.self.com/story/does-going-on-a-social-media-cleanse-actually-do-anything-for-your-mental-health</a></br>