dress - swap with amber
belt - asos
tights - c/o we love colors
shoes - modcloth
Lately I've been thinking a lot about life pre-social networking. I started blogging in 2009 on my classic film site, Silents and Talkies. At the time I hadn't heard of twitter or tumblr and my little brother was desperate to get on facebook, but I wasn't quite sure what that was. Flash forward three years and I have accounts on basically every site you could possibly have an account on. Twitter, pinterest, instagram, tumblr, facebook, blogger, etsy and flickr, oh my! It's just waaaay too much, right?!
Basically, I wake up, eat breakfast and then spend 90% of my day starting at my screen. A lot of my computer time is work related, so that obviously can't change. But can I filter out some of the sites I don't really enjoy, and simplify a little? You bet your buttons I can!! I am so determined to get off my behind and step away from the computer more this year. I get sucked into websites like tumblr and lose so much precious time that I could be spending with my family or working on art projects that have been collecting dust for months.
It's not just the time-sucking sites like tumblr that I need to filter out, but the constantly-connected sites like twitter. I'm pretty anti-social and private in real life, but somehow in the last three years I've developed "the twitter urge". It's a medical term (or at least it should be) for the need to share information about your life post haste. I've been weaning myself off twitter for the last couple weeks, but prior to that I had the twitter urge bad... really bad. If I'm having a good time on a family day trip, I should be enjoying it... not feeling like I need to write about it on twitter, right? Basically, I realized that anything that I find worthy of sharing online can be saved for this blog. It doesn't have to get immediately broadcast on twitter.
For a lot of people the nonstop connection is fantastic, but it's just not for me. To take it even further, I'm not even that fond of e-mail... I long for the days when it was perfectly reasonable to receive a reply to a message two weeks after you sent it. The frantic pace of instant communication and constant connection wears me out so much! I know I sound like an old lady, but I just want to sit back in my rocking chair and receive all of my messages via carrier pigeon... is that too much to ask?
I know that the world is just going to keep getting more connected and more connected until our dreams at night are being simulcast on youtube and our thoughts are transmitted in real-time 140 character updates on twitter. I can't escape back to a pre-social networking world, as much as I'd like to sometimes. But for a little while at least I can step back and take a breather. So no more twitter or tumblr, no new etsy shops and no new social networking accounts for me.
Does anyone else ever feel way over-connected? Have you ever tried scaling back?
