Feb: Media Fast

at 10:34 am on January 27, 2009 under About the Project, Feb: Media Fast | 4 Comments

With the VRSFCSF resolution month not quite over, but having proved somewhat successful (I’ll attempt to justify that in a later post), I’m announcing my most daunting month-long resolution to date: a Media Fast. From February 1st until the end of the month I will be engaged in a complicated and difficult temperance of media and especially social media. This one is to refresh my brain and try to figure out what role media should play in my social, work, and private life.

Yeah, it’s getting heavy.

What I intend to do, in general:

  1. Abstain from recreational online social and digital media (reading blogs, watching youtube videos, hulu, playing on Facebook, games, news, random google searches, twitter, pandora, last.fm, itunes, etc.).
  2. Moderate consumption of other electronic media: chat, email, film, DVDs, video games, and podcasts.
  3. Refocus on consuming static media and live media, engage in direct interaction, and create more media.
  4. Keep track of my progress and reflections.

Why?: My S.O. constantly teases me about my dependence and increasing addiction to the internet. I am subscribed to 100+ blogs in my google blog reader and I often spend 10-12 hours a day on the computer, constantly patched into the net, for work and recreation. My iTunes has more than enough music to entertain Noah (that’s over 40 days worth of songs for you gentiles), and 20 days worth of podcasts. If you added up the random seconds I spend reading twitter posts and “interacting” on Facebook it would fold into hours. I use my iPhone on the train, in the bathroom, while driving, and at the dinner table.

“But,” I argue most self-righteously, “I work for an institute that studies internet and society! As a digital media producer! I create podcasts, videos, and animations, and manage the youtubes and the blogs on a day to day basis, and that means I must constantly have my finger on the throbbing electronic pulse of the web! It’s a burden, but alas I must.”

But the meld is becoming evident. I engage with both colleagues and friends via facebook and twitter; I ravenously consume blogs, podcasts, and videos that entertain and inform me, but they also sometimes influence my creation of media for work.

In spite of all attempts to segregate them, profession pertinent media always entangle with the less relevant. Digital engagements have disgustingly lumped my work life and my personal life right on top of one another. It’s like when the lunch ladies in high school would dump the cinnamon apples right onto my mac and cheese.

While some of the digerati argue for the “give” of electronic media – they help enhance our lifestyle, increase productivity, build communicativity, foster informedness, lower social and institutional barriers, defeat the Nazis, and turn water into wine – even the most skeptical would argue that there is a “take” – which I intend to rediscover.

So does anyone have any tips? I’ll be creating the rules and consequences for my fast over the next few days. Should I cut out everything? Or allow myself a few indulgences? What should my penalties be if a break the rules? I’ve only got one week left, so bring it on!

[del.icio.us] [Digg] [Facebook] [MySpace] [Reddit] [StumbleUpon] [Technorati] [Twitter] [Email] More »

  • Kristen said,

    If you fail as horribly miserably as I know I would, I’ll pay $20 of your overall. I’d offer more, but it’s all I can afford to part with unnecessarily this year.

  • Roc Boogie said,

    I wish I could be completely consumed by the internet like that, and I’m feverishly working towards it under the guise of job hunting and prospecting. I think you should cut it out altogether if you can, your not Catholic so you cant have indulgences.

    Or better yet for every half hour you spend patched into electric media you should resign yourself to a half hour of a more traditional kind or media/art form, painting, drawing, reading and writing. (OFF THE INTERNET of course)

    Penalties?! Let’s see, you could check to see if the far east has any forms of torture unheard of in the west, or you could just write the gov’t to see what they’ve got up for grabs. Seriously though, if you fail to match your balance in time between electric media and traditional media by any margin, you should make the next month the suffering month and make all your punishments take place then.

    Oh and you should post pictures of whatever you create, be it a poem, short story, novel, novella, drawing, doodle, or whatever. We want proof!

  • sy said,

    this is, i think, impossible because it is an essential element of the network that the work activity accompanies the distraction, accompanies in a kind of double helix: the dna of the web is perhaps precisely this difficulty in making distinctions. i honestly do not know how you make the slice between those “job” and “everything else.” a crude example, this blog — your resolutions project — is not a work project in any strict sense, and yet, in commenting on it, as i am now, i am thinking about work things (how does the Net work? how do i become less distracted and more productive?) and interacting with a colleague. happy to discuss this more offline.

  • dandennis said,

    I’ll take your $20. I’m currently failing and only 12 hours in…

Add A Comment

home top