Episode 02: Are We…Anti-Social?
In this episode, we talk about the Not Small Things we have learned from spending so much of the last 5 years on Facebook. We’ve both watched “The Social Dilemma” and know the problems with Facebook are legion, but there’s been a lot of good that came out of Facebook, too. Especially for us personally. We’re joined by Rachel Happe, Co-Founder of The Community Roundtable and a thought leader on online communities, to chat about the good, bad and ugly of Facebook: what has enhanced our lives, what has horrified us, what has made us laugh, what worries us the most, and what do we think our relationship with Facebook looks like going forward.
Links for things we discussed in this episode:
Rachel’s organization, The Community Roundtable
Tim Cook taking on Facebook
Steven Pinker on the impact stories have on declining violence
And some bonus content!
For all the discussion we had around using social media with intention, we didn’t do a deep dive around establishing healthy limits with platforms. Our phones make it incredibly easy to fall into the social media wormhole without thinking twice.
Here’s some tips we both use to keep our social time down, and some individual tricks that work for each of us:
Delete apps from the phone, or at least move them off your home screen, in favor of using your web browser
But…don’t leave social media tabs open on your browser, and spend that time when you open them purposefully, then close them out again
Disable notifications on your phone so you’re not interrupted
Dara also suggests that you don’t carry your phone around with you, and even have rooms in your house where the phone isn’t allowed. She also likes going old school in two key ways - get your news in print, and go back to a real alarm clock.
KJ is a fan of using tech as a tool to actually limit tech usage - using phone settings to limit the apps you’ve kept to only one hour a day, and turning off all non-essential phone features starting at a certain time each night. KJ also uses a 25/5 rule during the day when she’s most inclined to use social media as a distraction. That means 25 minutes of pure work time, then 5 minutes of break time which can be for social media but also includes the news and text messages.
Rachel mentioned that she opts out of advertising from certain sources and frequently reviews the personal info that Facebook has access to.
For more great info - especially if you’re thinking about setting healthier limits for the entire family - check out this post from our friends at Cool Mom Tech.