One day without social media. Can you do it? Can everybody do it?

What if people would take one day off from social media in order to:

• Prove to themselves that they still ultimately are the ones in control over how they spend their time, not the big tech platforms and their algorithms.
• To understand that they have the power to reduce the tech platforms’ income by a couple of dozen million Dollars (if a large number of people would participate), just like that. It’s only symbolic of course, but it still will hurt them a bit. And once it has been done once, Facebook, Twitter and others will understand that it could happen again. And again. And again.
• Re-experience how it feels to live without having one’s mind hijacked by the big outrage-, validation- and drama-optimized machine which slowly turns people into ideological group thinkers, stressed individuals and manipulated citizens.
• Not have to witness how world leaders make politics and declare wars to each other over Twitter.
• To free a chunk of time to do other things. Whatever it is. And no, I’m not suggesting that one should “read a book instead”. But one good thing would be to hang out with some other fellow humans who have different perspectives and backgrounds - to realize how much one has in common after all, despite how pronounced once’s differences might appear on social media.

A day without social media would set a clear signal: The world isn’t as stuck in a giant, destructive feedback loop as it seems at this moment.

Let’s say Sunday, May 20 2018, should be that day. Can you do?

Here is a good read informing about the problems with the current status quo of social media and the Internet: “An Apology for the Internet — From the Architects Who Built It”

My personal suggestion for such an experiment would be to exclude private chat apps from it, both because it is practical and since they presumably don’t have the same negative outcomes as public social media platforms clearly do.