For a week, I see what life would be like without logging on to Facebook. I turned off all my notifications, turned away when my girlfriend was logged on watering her virtual plants and avoided all temptation. At the end of the week, I wanted to identify a difference between the useful and non-useful things that social networking provides.

Staying in touch
It turned out that there were only people that I stayed in touch with via Facebook, I didn’t have their current phone number or even email address. I don’t see this as a benefit of Facebook, but a lazy hook that they use to drag you in to their realm. There’s no reason that I shouldn’t have someone’s email address, they must have one to use the site in the first place, so the onus of this one is on me.

Direct Contact
The only new direct information that I learnt was that 4 different people like the photos that I take and I also discovered that a youtube video that I thought was a fake, turned out to be… well… a fake. I understand that you have to give to receive, and maybe with a week of zero interaction, I couldn’t expect much, but  I have to ask; is the time invested in priming these responses really worth it? In the short term, I feel like I get some kind of reward from this feedback, but it feels like a can of diet soda; a nice sweet taste, with zero calories in the long run.

Useful information
Just news that my sister has a cold, and my girlfriends brother posted an interesting dance music blog. I was kind of hoping for more, since all week I’ve been teased with my girlfriends cute little snickering as she checked her profile. I had dreams of side-splitting anecdotes and golden nuggets of enlightenment, but there didn’t seem to be any. What I discovered instead, was a desire to add a few more people to my ‘hide’ list, and that I will strive to post less throwaway comments.

The flip side
In my estimations, I must have diverted around 7 facebook hours, or if I stop lying to myself; 15 hours. So what did I do different this week, that I didn’t do for the past few months? I swam a kilometre at my local pool, went for a hygienist appointment at the dentist, took my cat to the vet to get spayed, created 6 new portraits (cat chappell, kara cabados, phineas kibbey, sue kibbey, magnus huckvale, dj bissen), and paid some attention to the neglected Guitar Hero that has been collecting ageing rocker skin cells in the corner.

I didn’t get a feeling of instant reward at first, where were the people telling me that they liked my photos, where was the feeling of satisfaction when taking my cat to a strange place to be poked and prodded? I learnt that the reward system that I’d become reliant on from Facebook was no more real than the rewards that I eventually derived from myself, but the one big difference, is that I was in control, not some external source. That I can live with.

I still agree with my previous post about life being how you choose to waste your time, so if I was to say that choosing to do things other than check my posts at hourly intervals was any better than playing an imaginary guitar based video game, I’d be a hypocrite (oh wait, I am a human… isn’t it in our nature to subscribe to Hypocrisy?). All that happened this week, is that I chose to do something different, and I enjoyed it. In that sense it was a success. If you are so inclined, I suggest that you make up your own life experiments and put them into practice.

I suspect this is a knock on effect on the way our particles work at a subatomic level, how either something will exist in a particular state, or it doesn’t exist. But then if research into quantum physics points to an alternative suggestion, where the world of binary results doesn’t necessarily apply, then maybe the way we look every day interactions should be changing too.

If someone was to ask me if I preferred the bitter salty taste of olives over a delicious Snickers bar, my answer would be a resounding no. But my binary response would fall flat on it’s face if that person then brought me a seafood pizza covered with small chunks of peanuts, chocolate and caramel…. “What?! I thought you didn’t like olives”.

I really do hate olives, I find them repulsive… but if I was to choose between a sandwich made with either plain or olive ciabatta bread, then I’d probably choose the latter. If we choose to live in a binary world, this makes me a hypocrite… but in a world where multiple contradictory statements exist in parallel, I’m just as normal as anyone else.

I wonder if it’s easier for us to manage ourselves, if we can categorise everything we think into tidy little packages… or if it’s easier for us to interact with the outside world if we present a consistent and predictable character to the people we meet?

If life for you, is a quest to define yourself as a person, remember that we aren’t always just one thing. We’re a big crazy bowl of Atomic Soup, which responds to the constantly changing environment. It changes, you change.

Sometimes I have to tell myself that it’s OK to have a love/hate relationship with olives, depending on how I feel at the time; I’ll either eat them, or start a protest march to facilitate the plants demise.