The 90-day challenge: unplugging from technology

Think of just how many hours a day you spend immersed in technology.

How many texts do you send out? What about tweets? How many stations do you have on Pandora?

It's hard to think of giving all of these things up, but according to Jake Reilly's "Amish Project," it can be done.

For 90 days Reilly, a 24-year-old student at Chicago Portfolio School, unplugged from all forms of social media to first see if he could live without it.

However, it quickly turned into a project to reclaim his social relationships that had grown somewhat stale.

In an article with Yahoo News, Reilly explained how taking on this challenge allowed him to find out who his true friends were.

Those he spent hours a day texting were soon gone, and those he rarely got to see were the ones he spent most of his time with. It's funny how those things work out.

As I've said in the past, social media and technology are great things, but they've certainly changed how we as a society look at social situations.

While technology is not necessarily a bad thing, it has changed the way we function, and some of the effects are not all that great.

These are just some of the comments I've heard people say:

"I'd rather text than call," or "It's so weird to see my Facebook friends in real-life." It is as if they are celebrities or Sims or something.

While I know I'm definitely guilty of this, I constantly wonder why we're so scared of human interaction.

The biggest problem I see is that we already know everything about a person from their social media.

We know what all they like to do, we know who they're dating and why they break up, and we know exactly where to find them at any given time (for all you people who check-in everywhere).

So why talk to them? You already know their story.

But then again, we all post what we want others to see of ourselves and that can be a very distorted view.

I appreciate the project because it gave me insight into something I'm not quite ready to tackle – cutting myself off from instant communication, but I think it's something we all need to consider.

Even if we just cut back a few hours or unplug our routers, getting to know people again for more than what we see on Facebook and Twitter could be beneficial to all of our lives.

So next time you get an urge to text someone to see how they are doing, try a call first and see if that brightens both of your days.

Next time you go to creep on someone's wall, ask them out to coffee so you can see them in person instead.

Social media has made interaction effortless and non-existent, but if we put forth the effort to reconnect, there may be hope for our social skills.

Bright is a junior photojournalism major of Hot Springs.