Megs Media Cleanse

I was fairly young when I got sucked into the whole social media thing. I got twitter on my 14th birthday, and nearly eight years later I've collected 22.4k tweets that are, for the most part, a load of sh**. Song lyrics, indirect tweets, funny pictures, my opinions, they're all on there for the world to see.

I can remember snapchat becoming a thing, (mrsgaryoldman was my first username *facepalm*) the controversy of removing best friends, bitmoji's, snapmap, group chats and all that fun jazz. Tumblr man. God, who knows many hours I spent on that site, editing my HTML or tagging my favourite images, making friends, being so proud when I hit my first 1,000 followers. When it comes to Facebook, that ship has thankfully sailed for our generation. The occasional funny tag and profile picture change, but really the messenger is really the only thing I regularly use these days. I'm a big fan of instagram at the moment, probably the one I use the most. With many family members and friends on there it's much more personal to me know and I like to keep up with what they're doing.

My brother makes jokes about my Instagram pictures getting a lot less likes than they used too, and he's not wrong and in embarrassing honesty sometimes it does slightly bother me. I was chatting to a friend at work about the Tristan, Khloe, Jordan drama and almost laughed at myself as I exclaimed "I can't believe she unfollowed him on instagram!" and was genuinely scandalised. Waking up after a night out and having to check through every social channel to double check I didn't post anything embarrassing during last night's buzz.

I decided to take a break, social media is great and I love it, but sometimes it's nice to just take yourself away from it. It's been just over a week since I properly used any social channel, as much as I could within this industry anyway, and this is probably the longest I've ever gone since I first got into social media. It's nice to just take a step back and breathe, live in the moment, and not worry about keeping everyone up to date with what you're doing. My media cleanse came around the time of lent so I've decided to roll with it and keep off my socials for the next few weeks. So far it's been pretty relaxing, and weirdly enough found I have more time to do stuff now I'm not distracted by scrolling and watching 2 hours of makeup tutorials I'm never even going to attempt.

However, one thing I've realised is how much I depend on social media to keep up with news and pop culture. One of my favourite singers released a new single this week and I only found out because spotify popped it up when I clicked the app. And news? I've had to actively go and find news, nabbing my Dads paper or specifically clicking on BBC news to see what's happening.