Last summer, some of our staff agreed to give up our biggest technology vices for a story called #disconnect. For most of us it ended up being things like email, iPhones and TVs. But the writers who enjoyed the assignment and learned the most all gave up something related to social media. So this year we decided why not take it up a notch and see if anybody was willing to give up social media completely. July 31, 2014
Of course, not everybody who participated last year got on board. Saying goodbye to Facebook all together isn’t nearly as easy as just saying you won’t read it on your phone after all. But there were seven Inweekly staffers willing to sign up for a thirty day social media blackout. We decided to call it #unsocial. The rules for #unsocial were simple—no social media of any kind for one
month. None, not even one tweet. We banned every platform—even those that we don’t use too often like Vine, just to be safe. Some of us suspended our accounts, some of us just deleted the apps from our smartphones. We tried to tell people we’d be gone without telling them why, just incase anybody wanted to invite us to their Scentsy party or tag us in a photo from middle school while we were away. We
didn’t want all of our “friends” thinking we were mad at them. So what does modern life look like without likes, friend requests and #throwbackthursday? Some of us cheated too early to even find out and some of us liked it so much we vowed to never go back. Here’s what our individual months being #unsocial looked like.
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