Stories about unplugging for the holidays abound at this time of year.
Most deal with shutting down email and counsel leaving the computer behind. They also tend to skirt the whole issue of social media. It’s attached to your mobile devices, after all, so it’s pretty hard to leave it all behind.
I speak from experience. When I took a two week vacation in London, my Twitter, Instagram and Vine followers were along for the ride. I could almost hear their plaintive cries from the iPhone in my pocket.
“Hey, what are you looking at? It sounds interesting out there. Can we see? Just for a minute? Please?”
I plan on taking a chunk of time off before the end of the year and seriously don’t know if I can take a break.
But I’m thinking I should.
It may not be a trendy thing to do. I don’t notice my social feeds slowing down during the holiday season. If anything, they tend to fill up with a sort of pale reflection of all the merry-making happening in real life. I even tried to talk to Twitter and Facebook about holiday activity trends, but neither one of them seemed too keen on the idea of a “social media break” and didn’t end up giving me anything I could use here.
Recently I broke the 40,000 tweet milestone. I also have 621 Vines and 1,357 Instagram posts. These all indicate a healthy (or unhealthy) level of social engagement. I know there are others who Tweet, Vine and Instagram a lot more, but among my IRL social set, I’m known as an over-sharer, someone who is always on his phone or tablet sharing.
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