21 Cold turkey, part 2

A few years ago I wrote a post titled ‘Cold turkey’ which marked the start of a several-months-long experiment to understand the effects of social media and cut off from a lot of such platforms. Most notably I weaned off Google+, where I had been incredibly active, Ello and a couple of others. I’d quit Facebook a few years before that so that platform did not feature in this exercise. I’ve recently begun to consider rerunning this because I’ve been toying with the idea of quitting a few more networks.

Since ‘Cold turkey’ was first published I’ve stayed on Twitter and Instagram and I’ve had an inactive account on Google+. I’ve got most returns from Twitter including connecting with people and balancing time spent versus gains received for it—as knowledge, awareness, networking etc. Instagram was retained for its usefulness as a platform for my photography but I no longer see its worth (and I’m not measuring in terms of ‘likes’ received either). I strongly feel a lot more can be gained by focusing my efforts on my personal websites instead. Google+ is a zombie you cannot quite get rid of without jeopardising everything else connected to your Google account but one can soften the blow.

This won’t be an experiment nearly as long or exhaustive as the last one but it’ll have visible impacts: quitting Instagram (but keeping the account for the username); reducing Twitter and using it only for intentional communication and, possibly, for some off-the-cuff jokes and mainly to directly message people; and giving my Google+ profile a once over to ensure it is as blocked from the world as possible, effectively making it a ghost. A lot of social media platforms deserve no less.