My Socials
I’ve been changing a lot of my engagement on social media recently in ways that have been good and life-giving. I thought I’d reflect a little on it and share some of my thinking about it.
I was an early signer-on-er with social media, back in those naive years when (we) new parents slathered the digital landscape with images of (our) precious babies without really thinking beyond their (inalienable) cuteness. Yes, I had a blog, from which I enjoyed massive in-kind profitably, mainly dopamine hits of digital connection to other bloggers and I gave it very little life or business aforethought. My modest blog helped me to exercise some creative muscles from time to time, and I once won a $30 toddler backpack in some kind of contest.
I signed up for Facebook too. Even when I could see that my investments of time and attention to Facebook were “killing” my blog, it still felt helpful and connective, especially when I was living very far from people I knew and loved and who also knew and loved me. I signed up for Twitter early on too but I didn’t learn it or use it for many years. When I finally did start becoming more of a “user” (yeah, I hear it too), it really did become a powerfully tempting and noisome feature of my life, especially during our days in Berlin.
These digital spaces offered me a place to go and they also, almost imperceptibly, formed me in practices. I can see better now how the various media trained my mind to think in certain ways, and even trained my body to perform certain actions in the midst of my daily doings. (I reflected on some of this in a review of Alan Noble’s Disruptive Witness I wrote in Fathom in 2018). Let me restate that: I allowed the media to train me by means of my participation in it. When I took breaks from time to time, I felt itchy, terrible, bored, and disconnected. I also felt small and vulnerable.
It has been important for me to understand why I have found all these places so tempting. It’s not just because I think Social Media Is B-A-D, BAD, Bucko! that I’ve been making changes. It’s more because I wasn’t often conscious of why I felt so drawn to them, or what I thought they delivered to me, or what good or gain I got out of them.
I craved connection, and the places offered taste of that in a way that I couldn’t get elsewhere. Facebook and Twitter helped me to connect with people easily. And for a time, that felt like a good thing. But I also experienced terrible “connectivity hangovers” from them, with the effects metastasizing far beyond my capacities to mitigate or manage them.
In terms of where I go today and how my participation forms me:
I’m a very small, inconsistent user of Instagram. You’re mostly likely going to find me posting very tightly shot images of snails, moss, the texture of a wall, an interesting flower or plant, or some image related to birds. I post something there to exercise a way of seeing. I’m also incredibly constrained about how much personally identifying material I share, but yes, if someone learns that I’ve written books and they are inclined to buy one, yay. Everything can be a commercial, which is why I don’t love just having all my interactions turn into commercials.
I’m also on GoodReads, where I interact with books — what page number I’m on, what books I’m trying to finish reading or digesting in some way. It’s all just books, and not even every book. It helps me to see that I’m actually reading things, even if my reading of them is sometimes as slow as a snail.
I’m also on LinkedIn, and I have been trying to amass a network there for a few years. I am still not sure how to belong there, yet I see it as a good place to know about people and their work. I’m ok with being bad at it for the time being.
A lot of the people I respect most in life are really bad at social media, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence. I’m rather chuffed to be doing all three of these somewhat badly. I really want to be good at things other than social media.
But also, importantly, I don’t think that being “good” at social media is a sign one is doing something wrong. It’s just a medium of communication, and thank God some people are good at it! I cheer when I see artists (like Michelle Berg Radford, or Jan Aiello, or Carolyn Wright, for starters) and personal trainers and athletes (like Carrie Cole, Laurie Howard, and Sue Reynolds) and writers (like Elizabeth Oldfield, Jen Pollock Michel, Paola Barrera, or Jenny Cromartie) and preachers (like Aubrey Sampson) and teachers contribute their unique and sparkly good in the world. It’s why I’m not inclined to issue some bromide against social media wholesale.
I want to hear and learn about the considered and creative material that people think is worth sharing there. I don’t think it’s proud or selfish to do so. Often those who are posting regularly in that vein on social media are doing so out of a place of great humility and service. I honor that immensely.
But it does give me pause that social media can give me sensations of hyper-connectivity that don’t — cannot! — quench the thirst I have for belonging and connection with others. I am learning to practice staying awake and alive to why I go there, what it might require of you and me when I do, and to be even more rigorously disciplined and practiced in investing my life in “actual” places among actual people. For me, when social media serves that end — and at times, it does and has — it’s good and life-giving.