What the Hell is a Social Media Hiatus?
How is spending time . . . not online . . . a thing?
Scrolling down through Twitter, especially YAWriter!Twitter (which is a whole different beast), I always get amazed when people announce — either through a tweet or through their extra-long username — that they are taking a hiatus from Twitter.
Never mind the fact that some of them are actively posting from Twitter while supposedly on hiatus, but that is a different can of worms.
The idea of taking a break from social media seems delightfully foreign to me. For as long as I can remember, the social internet — in whatever form was available — was a part of my daily routine. Not only that, it was usually the best part of my daily routine.
I’m not as old as some people — my first encounters on the internet as a kid were in AOL chat rooms and on the Nickelodeon online game site — I remember something about a Hey Arnold! game that was particularly fine, but that might just be some kind of rewritten memory. Also, lots of following in my mom’s footsteps and playing backgammon on Pogo.
As I moved into my tween and early teen years, AOL chat rooms were replaced with EzBoard forums, especially the Harry Potter RPG forums (with a bit of a dalliance into Lord of the Rings and ER-based RPGs), and a…
