What life is like without social media
The cons are also pros
So maybe you finally quit Twitter. Maybe you’re part of the exodus to Bluesky, and maybe rebuilding there feels fun. But maybe it feels like an obligation tinged with dread. Maybe you’re wondering if you really have to spend the next four (?) years once again glued to the news, but now delivered and interpreted by medium-randos walking and talking to their phone cameras. Maybe Instagram seems less fun now that you once watched a Reel of someone making a smoothie and now cannot claw your algorithm back from the depths of QAnon. Maybe you wonder what it would be like to never check the feeds again, and maybe that feels impossible.
So many of us, especially those with media or media-adjacent careers, have been trained to think that social media is mandatory, the only way to build an audience, and the only way to protect ourselves against the vicissitudes of layoffs and strategy pivots. I once felt this way, and part of me still does. And yet, I haven’t had any social media accounts since I quit Twitter in 2022. Before that, I had already quit Facebook and Instagram, and I never had TikTok. (I also used Substack until last year; we’ll get into whether that counts as social media next week.) I’m too far into my sans-social-media existence to write about what quitting would feel like now, but I can tell you three things about what my life—and the internet, and my job—looks like from the other side.
It’s not all good. It’s not all bad, either. Using social media requires tradeoffs, and not using it does, too. I prefer the tradeoffs of not using it, but I’m not here to tell you which to choose. I’m just here to tell you there’s a choice.
1. I’m out of the loop
First, the obvious downside. Since I stopped opening Instagram in 2020 (guess why), I haven’t known anyone’s big news unless they tell me personally. I don’t know what’s going on with friends and family unless I talk to them. There is no passive way for social information to reach me. My social life is not thriving right now, after months and years locked away with my ailments and my book, and I know I’m missing a lot. By the time a friend has a chance to tell me their news, it is often so old they’ve forgotten it’s news at all.
This can feel lonely and alienating, like I’ve been forgotten or left behind. But it has never felt as lonely and alienating, to me, as receiving and sharing those life updates through Instagram did. I hated consuming my friends’ lives as though they were advertisements, and I hated offering up my own for consumption. I don’t want my friendships to be passive, transactional, and mediated by a corporation or an algorithm. I would rather wait to find out my friends’ news in person or on the phone, even if it takes months or years and a lot of effort on both our parts. The effort is the friendship.
2. I don’t see ads
Well, I mean, I see ads. I see billboards, posters, the occasional TV commercial, banner ads, YouTube ads, and more. But none of them, not even the banner ads or the Youtube ads, feel like anything I have to look at or can’t ignore. I don’t think I’ve focused my eyes on a banner ad…ever. They don’t get under my skin. Most times, I barely notice them.
I’m sure some of this is simply my personality and capacity for tuning out information I’ve decided in advance I don’t care about (sometimes but not always a blessing lol). My eyes rarely settled on Instagram or Twitter ads, either. But this benefit goes beyond obvious advertising. Not having social media renders the entire world of influencers basically invisible to me. I do not see or have to think about the dark arts of making a body, a home, a career, or a family clickable and consumable for the online masses. Since quitting social media, I have never once looked at my couch or my hair or my food and thought it should be more like someone else’s thing I saw online. I’ve thought plenty of other things about them, but not that.
Influencer content—and advertising more broadly—are cultural texts worthy of critical attention and dissection. They tell us something about a society’s id and superego (which is why I love watching TV ads in foreign countries). Tremendously valuable analyses can arise from smart, engaged people having feelings about influencer content they see on social media and then wondering what those feelings are about. I just won’t be writing any of those analyses, and that’s ok with me.
3. I think my own thoughts
The most unsettling part of pulling way back on Twitter long before I deactivated it was the sense that, for the first time in years, no one else’s thoughts were in my head. If I wanted to have an opinion about something, it had to be one I developed without much help. There were no ready-made, bite-sized takes to swallow and absorb. I was still swimming in a sea of online opinions, but when they were 800 words long instead of 180 characters, I had to put at least some effort and intention into curating and reading them.
I’m not exaggerating when I say I couldn’t have written my book without this mental space and relative silence. I couldn’t have known what I wanted to say if part of my brain had still been attuned to what social media was saying. Whether or not I will be able to effectively promote my book without social media, well, that remains to be seen. But honestly, I’m optimistic. None of my accounts ever had the kind of reach that constitutes an author platform on its own. My platform was always my portfolio, my journalism, my contacts, my expertise. Social media pretended to be helping those things, but it was always actually hurting them.