The Social Experiment

Lent: 17th February - 3rd April

During this time I will be giving up Facebook. There are many reasons for this:
1. I am a geeky sociologist and would like to see the social implications for not having a facebook account.
2. I spend far too much time on it and I'm sure it's probably not healthy for my sanity...
3. It's Lent and I want to give up something harder than chocolate and alcohol (though I am also tackling these two weakness')
4. I want to do something related to social Networking/Facebook for my Independent Study next year so this is good preperation

You can keep up to date on how I'm doing on here, however I'd like to try and make it so that its blog doesn't become my escape route i.e I spend all my time on here instead of facebook, I'm NOT replacing facebook with a blog. This is mainly for research purposes and so you can all laugh at me when I crave it - though, will I ever crave it?

It is bad that I might crave a social network site? Which in theory, doesn't do much. I thought that as I was giving it up I should spend loads of time on it until then, but there really is nothing to do on it. Yes we can get up to date happenings for our friends and laugh at the recent groups created, or upload photos. But how can we spend about an hour sat doing THAT? Really?

The main thing I'm worried about is hearing about events/meetings. Especially given that a lot of uni based stuff is promoted or heard about via facebook. Surely I will hear about it through word of mouth?

I will seek to find out all these answers.
My hypothesis is that the first couple of weeks will be the hardest, then I'll just get use to. Although I dread the day of going back on when I will have a stupid amount of notifications - Yes I am aware that you will all abuse this and write pointless stuff on my wall....

Something I've had to do in preperation though is write down all the birthdays during Lent. How bad it that? Without facebook, theres a lot of birthdays that I probably would completely forget about. Our dependency on it really is quite absurd.

So, my adventure begins on Wednesday! I'm actually quite looking forward to it, although perhaps I'm just being really crazy, as my sister just said to me:

"Good Luck with your life"

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