Social Media Irony

Yesterday, I was off sick (just didn't feel good yesterday, nothing to worry about, and I'm fine now). I just didn't feel like doing anything other than getting a little sleep, reading, and playing video game football. I didn't do anything on the computer other than check the blog traffic a little bit (actually had more visits than usual, mostly regarding my 80s music posts), check Facebook once for status updates, and email. That was it. I just wasn't in the mood to "produce" anything, hence the silence on this blog and on Twitter. For the first time almost since I began, other than when I was on vacation, I didn't tweet at all.

Ironically, this came a day after my post on Social Media Overload. But you know what? I didn't miss it.

It actually felt good to be away from all of it for just a day, without worrying about losing touch with anything or anybody. Sometimes, in this hustle and bustle world of online media, we feel like if we take even the smallest break, we will lose touch with everything. It's like being in a race down the Information Superhighway and pulling off at a rest stop to use the bathroom while everybody else races on ahead. By the time you pull back onto the highway, everybody's long gone and you're back with the other latecomers.

I get some of that feeling with this blog, knowing that I have a few steady readers and then others who find it when the posts are sent to Twitter and Facebook. Of course, if I don't post regular content, Twitter and Facebook won't pick it up and that source of readership is gone when I take a day off. But it was interesting to see yesterday how strong (relatively speaking, of course, as I don't get much to begin with) traffic remained despite no new posts.

I'm reminded of that old 80s TV show, Growing Pains. In one episode, Kirk Cameron's slacker high school student decides to fake being ill and take a day off from school. The next day, when he goes back, he realizes that life went on without him while he was home. He had the misguided notion that life basically stopped until he showed up. It was quite the eye-opener for him.

For me, it's kind of the reverse. I expected life to go on while I was gone. What I was gratified to see was that it didn't leave me in its dust.