Tag: technology

We need the sound of silence.

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Have you ever realized how rare it is for you to sit in silence now a days? And I mean truly sit, not being sucked into your smart phone or distracted by life.

If your like me your almost always plugged into music, podcasts, or audiobooks. It’s a great way to consume and learn things you wouldn’t normally have the time for. I have been flying through books thanks to audiobooks, and I’m growing because of them. But because I’m listening so much, I don’t often walk the dogs around the block without headphones. I don’t tend to do the dishes without my phone on speaker and that’s not always a positive.

We need silence to really digest all our thoughts, we need our minds to bounce around like ping pong balls going topic to topic until we find something worth settling on. We need to listen to ourselves not just outside sources, and that is getting a lot harder to do.

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Cleaning my social media: Was it enough?

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I work on social media because I like social media. I enjoy scrolling through feeds, laughing, connecting, and getting inspired. There is a ton good to say about social media, and I think all the nay-sayers ignore the long list of positive features. It can build community, it can connect you with similar people when you can’t find them in your daily life. It can help make your life easier by teaching and informing. Its how most people get their news now a days. It exposes you to beauty that you wouldn’t otherwise see. And it’s great for a good laugh most days.

That being said, social media is a lot like most of your favorite foods. It’s wonderful, it brings you joy, but it needs to be consumed in moderation. It, like every other thing in this world, has negative features to balance it’s positive ones. That doesn’t mean you need to delete all your feeds the moment you notice the not so glittery side of social media, but it does mean that you need to find a way to filter and control yourself and your feeds.

I’ve written about the dangers of consuming things online. At the end of it I decided the solution was to balance what accounts I was following with accounts of the adverse. Then a few months later I wrote about how I filtered all toxic media out of my feeds, which is what I should have done in the first place. It was a learning experience because I lost most of the accounts I was following based on my definition of what toxic media is. I had to start over and find more accounts to follow, mainly ones that focused on hobbies and clean humor. I built back a nice positive social media experience. I thought that was it, that I had achieved what I had set out to do.

But then my fiancé, who doesn’t use hardly any social media, pointed out that I was scrolling instead of doing other actives, which lead me to realize that scrolling always seemed like an easier task than my hobbies, because scrolling doesn’t require you to think or move or commit to anything.

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Record Keeping, Technology Gathering: How to spend time in the moment while living with technology.

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IMG_8581Like everything, there is a balance to be found between taking pictures and living, or really any type of recording a living. You see the photos and videos saying “put down your phones” and rightly they should. We live in a culture dominated by apps and talking with each other but not really talking to each other. It’s not gone though, plenty of people who run social media live beautiful lives with adventure and exploration. But the question always is how much of it should you record? Is the time spent snapping photos taking away from your very enjoyment of just being in the moment. Here’s some ways I’ve learned to balance them:

  • Take pictures now. Post pictures later. You’re on the top of a mountain with a sunset that could kill, you want to share it, you want to talk about it, but you’re there now, with someone standing beside you. Take a few pictures, put your phone or camera away and just watch. Be in the moment live in the moment, while still having it recorded. Don’t spend your time glancing down at a screen to see if the pictures loaded to instagram yet. That is a waste of time. Do that while you’re getting ready for bed and don’t have something more important to be doing.
  • Delete the games. People fight me on this one, they like their phone games. The entire world gets crazed with them. I don’t even know what’s popular now, I know angry birds has passed, candy crush? I wouldn’t know because I don’t have them on my phone. If I need to pass time while in a waiting room I’m reading a book or talking up the person next to me (and I’m not perfect, sometime the social media scanning comes out too)
  • Don’t friend gather. Don’t follow people to get follow backs, don’t friend people on facebook just to have a big number of friends. I know facebook is fading now in popularity but I remember in high school people would proudly say how many friends they had, now it’s folllowers on tumblr and what not. It’s silly to gather friends just to gather them. On facebook it means a lot more scrolling, as it does with most other social media, and for what? To look at things that don’t even interest you? It’s not worth the time wasted.
  • Call people every now and than. I know, everyone hates getting phone calls when they are in the middle of something, but even if it starts with a “hey can I call you?” text, talking to people on the phone is 100000% more personal for everyone involved, not to mention you can say things in a fraction of the time it would take to text it back and forth.