To Social Media or Not to Social Media. That is Not a Complete Sentence.
I turned off the social media firehose awhile ago. Now that I’ve been clean and sober for a few months I wonder why it took me so long to tap out. Although I value cyber connections on some level, there’s no question that the negative outweighed the positive, at least for me. And in any case, I can eliminate the bad while hanging onto most of the good by just unfollowing my contacts without deleting them. This way I can check in on or message friends when the fancy strikes me, yet my feeds are reduced to the occasional ad it’s easy to ignore, unless it’s for socks you can also use as microwaveable tortilla warmers. PLEASE TELL ZUCKERBERG TO KEEP SENDING ADS FOR TORTILLA WARMING SOCKS.
This is the face I make when I’m judging you for judging me for posting a picture with someone’s thumb showing up at the bottom edge of the picture (Sundance, Utah; March 2021)
I used to think social media helped me stay informed, that by opting out of my newsfeeds I would be figuratively sticking my head in the sand, abdicating my civic responsibility. Except, media outlets largely do not inform, they manipulate. I hate to sound like an old curmudgeon, but most of what is passed off today as “news” would not have made the evening newscast 35 years ago. To fill web pages and broadcast time, media outlets sensationalize insignificance and convince us that ignoring it is a hallmark of the lazy, the unenlightened, the morally bankrupt. That this business model works so well is more indicative of our willingness to let others tell us what we think than it is of some sort of ethical shortcoming on the part of media conglomerates. They’re just doing their capitalist duty — providing what people want (and pouring billions of dollars into getting people to want it). We, on the other hand, are sort of failing at thinking for ourselves.
I also used to think social media connected me to people I care about. But the truth is it just puts distance between us. It distorts normal, healthy human relationships, flattening people who are, in reality, colorful, complex, multidimensional beings into paper-thin, sweaty, red-faced caricatures made solely of opinion, outrage, and memes, shoving half-baked “news” articles and doctored photos of long weekend exploits down your cyber throat.
Actual relationships — versus social media “friendships” — are built on shared experiences or interests, geographical proximity (i.e. you’re neighbors), and some level of mutual trust that flows from this contact. They are certainly based on much more than decontextualized political, social, or metaphysical opinions.
Social media, by contrast, encourages and facilitates networks of “friends” who are actually often people you met once at a party four years ago, or people you went to high school with and passed in the hallway every Thursday on your way to band practice after school and sort of awkwardly nodded at. And now you receive regular updates about these peoples’ fiercely held positions on guns, gays, wealth distribution, race, climate change, and, if you’re lucky, how cool it was to be plastered last weekend and wake up slumped against the tire of a small economy car they later learned they rented with cash after drunkenly hawking their washer and dryer. Which belonged to the landlord.
You don’t actually really know these people. You never established the mutual trust necessary to offset their — let’s put it nicely — quirks. What’s more, we shouldn’t even have to know the opinions of casual acquaintances. Pre-social media, what kind of interpersonal encounter amounted to you walking up to someone you vaguely know, skipping a greeting, and proceeding directly to shouting socio-political stances at one another? Also, hundreds of other people are standing there watching, and you don’t know most of them either, and they’re shouting their opinions too? That’s a messed up social encounter, and that’s what “interconnectedness” won us.
What’s worse, social media can even strain friendships with those you do know well. Pre-social media, did you call your buddy and say, “Hey, let’s go hang out and talk about critical race theory, I saw that sign you put on the front of your bike that says you think systemic white supremacy isn’t real, and we should talk about it — loudly and without listening, eventually devolving into simply shouting over one another — so that tomorrow I can eye you suspiciously over my Trapper Keeper in math and think how morally bankrupt you are.”? I mean, some people did that, but I wasn’t in drama so I didn’t know them.
Yet, although social media doesn’t force us to do anything, it peels back the curtain on what used to be our friends’ closely held thoughts and beliefs. In any given pre-social media friendship, we could choose to share these thoughts and beliefs if we felt the relationship’s foundation warranted it. Or, alternatively, we could talk about baseball cards, King’s Quest, and Lisa Dirksen and have a pretty solid friendship based on nothing more than that as well.
I have found myself far too often over the past decade thinking negatively about people I know are good and kind and smart, simply because we disagree on things we don’t even need to know we disagree about, or things we probably would disagree about a lot less if we were just two friends, talking over donuts about these points of alleged disagreement. Actual, in-person friendships tend to weather these types of disputes a lot better than online ones.
So it finally clicked that I get to choose what I know about friends, acquaintances, and complete strangers. Nobody is forcing me to open my feeds to anything and everything. I can access news from a wide range of actual news sources, on my own, without needing algorithms — which are specifically designed to make me angry and, therefore, more likely to stay online and keep clicking — to feed it to me.
Now you’re all gone from my feeds. No offense. You’re still in my heart, along with Phil Collins, who I’m not connected with on social media, but who seems like a decent person/drummer. If I want to know what you think, I can send you a personal message and a gif of Phil Collins dancing. He can’t dance, by the way. Nor can he talk. In fact, the only thing about him is the way he walks.
Postscript: I acknowledge it’s at least a tiny bit hypocritical, if that’s the right word, to withdraw from social media but still send material into the maelstrom for others to consume. In other words, if anyone is to read this, they need to remain connected to their social media feeds, which I have just spent like 1,200 words suggesting is potentially unproductive. How do I square that circle? I don’t. I write, I post, you read or you don’t. I’m happy if you read, happy if don’t, as long as you’re happy. But what makes me happiest is alpacas.
