Results from Media Blackout May

How time flies. I said that I'd make an update in June on how Media Blackout May went - and it's now halfway through August... Oh well, better late than never I suppose. To be fair though, I didn't jump straight back into consuming news and social media as soon as June rolled around, I have actually maintained the media blackout for the intervening months. And really, that was sort of the point of this experiment - to change behaviour and habits. So how did it go?

Initially, it was difficult. If your go-to habit when there's not much happening is to whip out your phone and check Facebook, then suddenly you're left with nothing. If you watch or read the news over breakfast, as I did for a while, then that's no longer an option. It was interesting to see just how many times you would find yourself in that situation each day - just kind of staring blankly, asking yourself, 'what can I do instead?'. But after a while, probably a couple of weeks or so, these moments became an opportunity to find some clarity and focus. To think about what I was doing beforehand and what I was going to do next, or noticing that I needed a break from whatever I was doing.

Have I felt out of the loop? Not really. In fact, I feel like I've side-stepped a number of things that might have made me angry or upset. Also, because I haven't read everyone else's analysis of an event, I'm free to do my own. In a world inundated with information, it's very easy to get bogged down and very easy to rely on others to form your opinion for you. The 'low information diet' helps with this; your brain has less stuff to sort through and process, and once it has, it can spend more time connecting and creating. The more you spend time away from these sorts of time sinks, the more you realise how unnecessary they are to your day-to-day life and the more time you can spend doing things you enjoy. In the last couple of months, I've spent a lot more time reading, doing band stuff and writing. It's been nice.

Again, I want to stress that I don't think that news and social media are useless, I just think that I needed to reprioritise their importance in my daily routine. More often than not, they'd just become a  habit - something to occupy a few minutes of time between other things. Which I think is a comment on a wider trend, namely our compulsion to always be entertained and always be doing things.