Me and a small group at Camberwell have set up a one week campaign to try and get people to boycott Facebook for a week and to use their time doing more productive things, as well as events related to social networking.
On the first day we set up a station in the university canteen and were giving away free tea and biscuits - Courtney even made some facebook themed biscuits which were our best sellers along with the pink wafers! This evoked curiosity as to what we were doing and we were able to speak to people about their Facebook usage. We also attracted the attention from a lady doing a MA in Bookmaking who said she would like to interview us for her dissertation, as well as a lecturer who had written a thesis based on what we were doing that said he would like to help us, and also an MA Graphic Design tutor who felt strongly about our cause. It was good to receive such great feedback on our first day of campaigning.
Later that afternoon we supplied pens, paper, envelopes and stamps so that people could write a handwritten letter to a family member or friend which we would then send off for them in the post. The aim of this exercise was to steer away from the norm of sending drab, emotionless e-mails and instant messages. The workshop went really well and we sent off over 20 letters - including one to Africa, America and Australia. We wrote the name of our blog on each envelope - spreading the gospel far and wide (but not via Facebook!).
Today the team are going to stage a series of talking head interviews to collate information on how people use Facebook, what for, for how long, etc. And in the afternoon we are hosting a series of basic language classes in Japanese, Danish, French, German and Russian.
Take a look at our blog - http://logoutblog.tumblr.com/ - to stay updated with what we are up to and for more suggestions on how to spend your time productively instead of weaseling away on Facebook for hours.
Life without social networking is actually more social, who'd have thought it?!
