A new movement is growing that is encouraging people to sign off for ninety nine straight days.
The “99 Days of Freedom” project has now begin as an experiment in the promotion of happiness, which is effectively working as an anti social media marketing campaign that is encouraging people to give up their use of Facebook for ninety nine consecutive days.
The relationship that users of the social network have with it appears to be quite a love-hate connection.
While most users do access it quite regularly, this doesn’t mean that their opinion of it is necessarily all that good. This particular social media marketing campaign is making an attempt to stop the use of the site for 99 days in order to give people the ability to break away from feeling obligated to use it, and to see how it impacts their overall sense of happiness. While there have been a large number of various forms of boycott and other types of strike that have been launched against social network use, this one is more of a pause to attempt to experience life without it, for a while.
The impact of this social media marketing effort and the size of its participation has yet to be seen.
What is known is that there is a highly complex appeal and repulsion associated with Facebook and the negative side of this relationship was greatly exacerbated when the network revealed that it had secretly been conducting an experiment on its users to see if it could tinker with their emotions. The company altered the newsfeeds of 700,000 users without their knowledge or permission, in order to give them a more positive or negative angle. What they discovered was that the mood that they shared was contagious and brought about corresponding posts of either positive or negative statements.
While a user may feel as though he or she is immune to any emotional impact from social networking, this company’s own experiment helped to show the size of the effect that the activity is having on our emotional state.
And so, the launch of the social media marketing campaign to stop the use of Facebook for 99 days and to give the digital status update- and newsfeed-free world a chance has begun. Depending on its popularity, the results of this voluntary experiment could provide considerably more insight than the controversial hidden one had done.
