So I cut my social media diet by about 95%. TL;DR. It’s weird. Mostly better. Sometimes… I’m not sure how I feel about it.
My mother quit smoking when her mother died. She said, “I knew I was going to feel terrible, so I figured, why not get both things over with at once?”
Of course, her mother’s death, fromCOPD caused by smoking.
Still, it resonated. “I was going to feel terrible anyway.”
So, while I felt terrible about my parents deaths, I cut out social media. A writing friend who is 10x more productive than I had been shaking their head pityingly for years now, lamenting the novels melting into conversational typing funding right-wing billionaires.
So, the problem with my experiment of course is I changed two variables at once. What’s really changed?
Now and then I search my feeds, groping for adrenal rage in the shared comments of ‘friends.’ (Some of my social media friends are actual friends; at over a 1000 in both platforms of course, many are just contacts.) This sickening urge to unfold a comment string to find something stupid, detestable, so I could feel that surge of strong emotion. So I could verbally spar with an asshole. Somewhere to scream my sadness, rage, and misery at the world.
As I do that… now… I stop. Every now and then I compose a reply… and delete it. But I like and share the odd political post.
But liking and sharing is the tinder, I should say kindling, of the feed, the raw material social media uses to generate ‘engagement’, (IE, disunity, anger, polarization, outrage, depression, social humiliation and shaming, and now and then, actual violence).
So I don’t feel good about political liking and sharing either. But… you feel like you need to make yourself known, take a side, and it’s very hard not to imagine that social media is a good place to do that. All evidence to the contrary.
Social media discontent seems pretty good at wrecking things. The Arab spring ousted some miserable governments. Which were gradually replaced by equally miserable governments. Because social media uses algorithms to magnify amorphous discontent… without empowering the creation of organizations that can turn anger into lasting social change. Or rather, the rage comes first. This is the force that causes people to rise up, slaughter the ‘bad’ guys, and then mill about wondering what comes next.
Which is the next monster taking advantage of the chaos.
Move fast, break things, has long been a silicon valley motto. Unspoken of course, is the idea that the basic fabric of civilization, the infrastructure, that must remain unbroken is Someone Else’s Problem, Primarily the governments that the techno-libertarian right wing majority tries to dismantle, to shrink to bath tub drown-able dimensions.
But I digress.
Broadly of course, this is about my own response to social media, and in that personal-is-political way, thinking about how my abdication might scale. A movement rising up from the twenty people that read this blog to CHANGE THE WORLD! The social media come-on. The viral lottery. Say something clever? God forbid, wise? It blows up? That’s social capital! Platform building! Which can turn into real money! Or Social change! Or something good!
So, we plunk our quarters into the social media slot machine, praying for the jackpot, and now and then that happens. But we know, or should remember, that the real winner is always the house. Run by gangsters for profit, who move fast, break things, and laugh at the grown-ups who scramble in their wake to pick up the pieces.
But I will have to adapt to social media somehow. And hopefully society does too, in my lifetime.
And I know much of my disillusion is simply the collapse of my previous delusion. No golden age. There was never a golden age. Maybe the fights are just out in the open now. Maybe nothing has really changed.
But I feel weird.
Taking a huge step back from social media, coping with the loss of my parents generation, feels like growing up.
Not fun. But necessary.
“So, we plunk our quarters into the social media slot machine, praying for the jackpot, and now and then, that happens. But we know, or should remember, that the real winner is always the house. Run by gangsters for profit, who move fast, break things, and laugh at the grown-ups who scramble in their wake to pick up the pieces.”
Well said. Added to my notebook. Thanks.
God I love your notebooks. Glad to get in one.
I am now keeping files in Notes, mostly about my WIP and work; mostly my notebook has been social media and or email, but now I have the blog, which has been a minor component of my output always.
Doing a cover for a book of Author’s letters, an old media form that social media doesn’t really capture. The Letter.
So hard to not romanticize the past.
I’ve cut back, a lot, on Facebook. I’ve suspended my FB blog page, snoozed a couple of other pages, and left a few. I’ve also weeded out some people.
I like the connections I made to you, Steve Perry, Steven Barnes, Dan Moran, Karl Martin, and David Gerrold, among others.
I like all the people you mention, and you too.
…I hate trivializing the idea of addiction, but I have alway had a hard time shutting up. Social media is like crack for me. And so much of it is politics, which drives me crazy. Because a third of the human race knows what to do to make a better world, a third will go along with it most of the time, and a third continually blocks almost all progress. At least here, for fucking decade after decade.
Attempting to do the same thing. It’s an interesting experiment that leaves me feeling a little empty. But I have been reading more. I like the casino analogy.
Hey Liz, yeah, I agree on the empty thing. It’s so weird. We used to just have friends and work friends and old friends, and acquaintances… i thought that social media would just extend old friendships, or start new ones, but instead it created this new category. I guess sort of like neighbors used to be, when people had neighbors, but much better, because the new ones are sorted out better by interests and temperment.
Saw someone saying goodnight to their ‘twitter family’ yesterday, and felt a bit sad. Why am I cutting myself off from any kind of family?
Mysterious creepy assholes creeping into every interaction to enrage you and keep you engaged, and the ease of uncontrollable conversations around generally terrible news of course, are sort of new. THat’s what we avoid.
Oh, and now that I have approved a post of yours, there’s no wait for moderation anymore, by the way. So this feedback can go faster. We expect immediate interaction, from social media; this feels like the pony express.