Would You Give Up Social Media?

As part of a project dubbed The Social Experiment, more than 600 Shoreline high school students and teachers are giving up texting, Facebook, Twitter and email for a week.  You can read all about the experiment in this Seattle Times article.

It’s an interesting experiment, but I think a flawed one.  I think the experiment should target controlling the use of social media, not eliminating it.

While students say they are replacing texting, posting and tweeting with doing chores and homework I wonder if that’s really the case?  While in high-school I and my friends were skilled at avoiding chores around the house and not doing homework.  In fact, we often claimed we couldn’t do our chores because of our study load and vice-versa.

Communication, of which social media is a subset, is vital in society.  The fact that we’ve moved from sending smoke signals and carving messages into rocks to the instant dissemination of information doesn’t make the medium wrong, or using it wrong.  It just means that, like everything else, we need to be the master of these tools so we run them and they don’t run us.  Facebook, Twitter, You Tube, text messaging and email are not going away.

I’ll share those skills with you as soon as I learn to curb my appetite for chocolate.

PS – I wish those students documenting this experiment in video would offer us daily updates.  After all, we haven’t sworn off of Social Media.

See what the students think:

And what the teachers think:

 

PS.  These are the same schools that last year created this You Tube video sensation!  You gotta like these teachers!!!

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