(Disclaimer: My blog posts are auto-tweeted to my Twitter and Facebook accounts; I’m not actively doing it.)

For Lent this year I’m giving up Facebook and Twitter. It’s not that I use those services all the time, obsessively, but like most people my age, I’ve gotten used to having Facebook as something to kill time with (read: procrastinate assignments with) on the internet. Twitter is just another distraction. (I’d give up Tumblr too but I kind of need to access it in order to post these blogs! I just don’t check my dashboard as much.)

What’s been really interesting about this little experiment so far, even though it’s only been the first day, is that I’ve already felt disconnected from things. I don’t mean just the people I’m friends with on both services, but also just the world in general. I hadn’t realized how much I rely on Twitter to keep up with what’s going on in the world. I follow a lot of news services on Twitter, like the Guardian, the New York Times, Huffington Post, and the Daily Beast, to name a few. I’d even taken those same services off of my Google Reader because I saw all of their updates on Twitter. I suppose I have to add that back to Reader before I fall behind on what’s going on.

I’ve been maintaining for a while that the majority of Facebook is totally unnecessary, anyway. I don’t really need to know all of these details about people’s lives, and if they really wanted me to know, then they’d probably just tell me. The people who I really keep in touch with can all get in contact with me in ways that aren’t Facebook and Twitter, anyway, so I suppose this’ll also be a really interesting experiment regarding my relationships.

Well, I suppose that’s the end of day one!