It’s never happening. Please forgive the clickbait title.
I quit Facebook a year ago, and my reasons why haven’t changed: it’s a terrible waste of time; it encourages jealousy, pettiness, and negativity; what you post there is used by Facebook to manipulate you; and Facebook’s editorial stance is entirely at odds with my values. While I do miss occasional family updates, friends’ pictures, and the pride of showing my friends what my wife and son are doing, the cons significantly outweigh the pros.
Yes, I have my website link to Facebook when I have a new blog post, but that’s me using Facebook rather than it using me. I still maintain that nobody gets rich off of Facebook ads, but even if they did, there’s no way on God’s green Earth that I’ll give my money to Facebook.
I moderate my use of Twitter with an electronic timer. My daily Twitter allotment is 20 minutes a day, though I haven’t gone past 12 minutes since I began timing myself. Sitting there, scrolling through the feed, is exactly like looking at Facebook, just with shorter posts and more hostility. Between the endless book advertisements from the same rapacious hack authors and the blistering political hot takes retweeted from a thousand bleating opinion sites, it’s digital noise. No, scratch that: it’s digital cacophony.
Oh, I still kibbitz with my Twitter buddies and enjoy seeing what they’re saying and doing. But more time spent on Twitter means less time working, reading, or being with family. We used to say that TV rots your brain. Social media rots your brain now. And it doesn’t make you feel good afterward.
I communicate with about 3 or 4 people on Google Plus, so it’s worth keeping. It has actually become my favorite social media platform. I’m in, I talk to friends, I read content, I’m out.
When I consider that few of the people I admire and want to emulate post a lot on social media, I realize that it’s a bad place to use what minutes I have on this planet to achieve my goals, whatever they may be.
My friend David Angsten, a terrific, thoughtful writer, titled his blog Be Here Now. Isn’t being here now the way to go? And doesn’t social media deny that by making us spectators in our own lives? David’s right: be here now.
It’s where I’m trying to stay. I hope you’ll join me.
We still have telephones and email addresses. We can talk and write letters and visit each other and maintain friendships the way we used to.
This is a subject I could talk about all day with you, Dave, but, in short, I agree: Social media can be a counterproductive time-suck, and Facebook (as a business model and platform) in particular takes a hell of a lot more from its users than it gives in return. Blogs may not, for the most part, have the “reach,” but at least they’re user-owned and -controlled, and everything we post contributes to our intellectual repertoire, rather than being yet another piece of online ephemera (pictures of our meals for Instagram, for instance). I’m not on Facebook either, and though it does mean missing out on updates from friends and family, all of whom live 3,000 miles away, it just forces me to pick up the phone a little more often and be here now. Though I never expected at forty years old to become the old man on the porch (“Back in my day…”), I’ve decided that I’m quite all right with being old-fashioned.
Hey, Sean:
I have no doubt that if you did take pictures of your meals and put them on Instachat or Snapgram, they’d be worth looking at.
Your point RE: internet ephemera is vital: rather than contributing to momentary noise through Facebook or Twitter, the point of blogging should be to build something that adds to a body of knowledge. While I don’t fool myself into thinking that what I do here will stand the test of time, I use social media of all kinds to boost signal, not noise.
David, thanks, very kind. I’ve been off FB for a few days, so missed this post. Agree completely with all of it. Nevertheless, glad to hear you’re back!
Well, the title was a clickbaity-sort of lie, but it’s always good to hear from you!