A sketch from the Will Ferrell era on Saturday Night Live came to mind when mainstream media reported late Monday about the big crash earlier in the day on the new media.

Social media giant Facebook said its 1.35 billion active users couldn’t access the site for about an hour thanks it tried to change something with the configuration settings. Apparently, technical support once again put itself in the late George Carlin’s pantheon of oxymoronic phrases like “jumbo shrimp” and fouled it up. I even noticed the slowdown as I tried to cure the boredom of doing laundry by looking at the site. It turned into hypnosis-by-swirl, which is what happens when a site doesn’t load.

In the sketch, Ferrell and co-star Nancy Carell, then going by her maiden name, Walls, play co-hosts of a morning news show whose teleprompter has failed. To paraphrase some of their lines, their words were taken away. In a scene tailor-made for the over-the-top Ferrell, the studio devolves into a scene vaguely reminiscent of “Lord of the Flies”, as they and the weatherman, played by comedian David Alan Grier, size each other up and fight for dominance of a world gone mad. Good makeup and props can be credited for the rest of the sketch.

This devolution of humanity is joked about in my circle of friends (real-life friends, mind you. I see them often outside the bounds of a news feed). But ask yourself the same questions. Could you live without social media for an hour? Can you put the device down and not mindlessly scan people’s mental processes they feel the need to publicize? When not using the site for work purposes, it’s a time-passer for me. If you want to play with your equilibrium a bit, try turning off all media around you — the TV, your phone, your stereo, whatever device needs which needs electricity to run. You’ll find that time itself seems to slow down, which isn’t entirely a bad thing.

Yesterday’s outage also claimed some time on Instagram, which is owned by Facebook. That, of course, meant no silver-toned pictures of lunch for an entire hour. Yes, I’ve posted what fellow snarkies call “food porn” on my page before, but I usually save it for a really good dinner. Waste of phone battery to put a PB&J sandwich on there, you know?

As for those questions, try it sometime. Let your inner thoughts belong to you, for once. Think of the time you’ll not save, but actually create. What a novel idea.

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Danny Barrett Jr. is a reporter and can be reached by email at danny.barrett@vicksburgpost.com or by phone at 601-636-4545.