Inside Yoga 79 (21/6/13)
“I feel that I’m getting too dependent on phones, on Twitter,” said Neil Gaiman. “It’s a symbiotic relationship – that instant ability to find things out, to share. I want to see what happens when I take some time off.”
Author Neil Gaiman announced last week, in the Guardian newspaper, that he will be taking a sabbatical from social media for six months from January 2014. Gaiman announced that he would take a break from updating his 1.8m followers on Twitter, his 500,000 Facebook friends and maybe even posting for the 1.5m readers of his blog.
“I’ll be taking about six months off,” he said, “a sabbatical from social media so I can concentrate on my day job: making things up.”
What I found so interesting is that even though the author uses social media and has found success through these media outlets, he feels the need to take a break. The author thanked his Twitter followers in his latest novel for helping him check the prices of sweets in the 1960s, but confessed that he would have “written the book twice as fast” without them.
The problem for Gaiman was not the amount of time spent using social media; it’s how it spreads into every cranny of our existence.
“People ask me where I get my ideas from,” he said, “and the answer is that the best way to come up with new ideas is to get really bored.”
He hasn’t yet decided how far to go with his vow of electronic silence – whether to cut himself off entirely from the internet – and doesn’t yet know where he’ll be, or what he’ll be doing.
Deciding to take a break from social media must be very hard for many of us, as it is so much a part of everyday living, but this story does beg the question: how good is it for us? And can we stop ourselves, can we take a break from it. Imagine how holidays used to be, in those pre-mobile phones/pre-internet days. We could go away, play and relax for a week or two, and then return home to find out how everyone was getting on at work or at home. These days we might spend a part of the holiday in contact with everything we are trying to take a break from – so much for a holiday away from it all!
Social media is not the problem, but it is our relationship with it. As Gaiman said “it spreads into every cranny of our existence.” It’s an addiction, and possibly not a healthy one.
In meditation we learn to “pause” just for a few minutes, when we stop and pay attention to our breathing and body. It doesn’t take long but has such a positive effect on our well-being and also our ability to function – in the author’s case this would be to think creatively.
What social media, and all that comes with it in our IT world, does is to reduce those pauses in our life. It takes away the spaces that we need in our life. And it is something like a stealth poison – it will do the damage before we see it coming. We are sleepwalking into these problems and will only be able to look back when something has gone wrong and see that the root of the problem was an addiction to social media or the internet, or both and any other technology I have not mentioned.
As said above, social media is not a problem in itself – I will be posting this blog on social media so it does have its uses, but many of us are possibly so immersed in being connected to all the chatter in the social media that we cannot see what it is doing to our lives. And before I am told –“my life is fine”, I am asking us, do we really know how our life is if we cannot switch off for a moment and take a break from social media and the rest? Perspective is a place better seen from afar.
We can step back in little ways, for example, I usually keep spend part of the weekend – Saturday or Sunday, or perhaps both days – switched off from all forms of social media and internet technology (except the call function on my phone). It is refreshing and enjoyable to do this. It represents time off and I usually feel better for it. I recommend trying it yourself.
As it is now late afternoon on Friday, I am now off for a bit.
To read the Guardian story (it remains on the site for a limited period) see http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/jun/14/neil-gaiman-social-media-sabbatical
