Good morning. Minus this blog, January 2018 marks one year since I left Facebook, Instagram and all other forums of social media. I suppose it was back in the fall of 2016 when I felt that social media was detrimental to my well-being and disruptive to my peace. At that time I noticed much of social media becoming increasingly polluted by toxic disputes regarding the Presidential election and the rash of unarmed black men killed by police officers.
Rather than bringing people together for conversations directed at understanding, I came to see that social media actually served as a mechanism that pushed people farther apart into shouting matches aimed at condemnation. The more space social media puts between those who disagree, the more it pushes both sides to the extremes. It wasn't long before I observed some friends and family abandon the middle ground to become extremist without even realizing it.
Others are welcome to disagree, but I believe polarization, isolation, and extremism become inevitable when one prefers to communicate their thoughts and desires electronically. This leads me to the second reason I stopped using social media. In addition to being disheartened by the growing hatred and division, I also felt discouraged by the decay of some friendships brought on by social media.
Before social media, I looked forward to birthday phone calls or calls from friends to let me know they were engaged or expecting their first child. Then social media took hold and the slow decay of some friendships started. It did happen all at once, but in bits and pieces. First the birthday calls didn't come, then even birthday texts stopped. It wasn't long before it became apparent that simply posting, "Happy Birthday Chris!" on my Facebook wall satisfied the requirements of friendship.
Looking back, I believe the first crack in my view of social media came when I had to tell some Facebook friends Marcus had passed away weeks earlier because they didn't yet know about the worst day in my life. Yeah I think it was then that I realized that something had to change.
Now I know that the couple hundred Facebook friends I had accumulated loved me very much then and still do today. It's just that after losing Marcus, the occasional sound of a person's voice or the sporadic warmth of another's hug made any day temperate. The days you don't hear or feel anything at all, those are the days that are the coldest.
In thinking about the fallacies of social media, I thought it would be helpful to look at what it means to be social. By its definition, social implies a tendency to form cooperative and interdependent relationships with others. So perhaps the way our society becomes less combative and more cooperative is by people using their phone to make a call rather than post a tweet. Maybe the means by which I depend more on you and rely more on me is by sitting down together at the dinner table instead seated before our perspective keyboards.
I've made peace with the fact that most of my friends and family will continue to use Facebook and Instagram as their news outlet for birthdays, engagements, weddings, and pregnancies. Consequently, I've come to accept the likelihood that future updates about my friends and family will come second-hand or not at all.
So even if you see more positives than negatives to social media, I would encourage all of us this week to find opportunities to be more personable and less electronic. May all of us look for chances to be more spontaneous and less automated. However, I don't think it would hurt to consider the possibility that social media isn't social.
CJE