Is social media anti social?

Look! My first profile picture! Awwwww.

I was late jumping on the Facebook train. I abjectly refused for many years, often missing party invites and having to remember my friends’ birthdays the old fashioned way. Still sharing pictures on Flickr like a has-been and having to actually write up an email to invite people to see my shows.

Then I started writing for an online platform that insisted we get a Facebook or Twitter account to share and promote our stories. I decided that Facebook was the lesser of two evils and hopped on. (I’ve still managed to avoid Twitter.) From then on, my Facebook usage grew in pretty much the typical fashion. I friended people in improv class, in every play that I was in, people I met in workshops, etc. Of course I also friended my family and friends.

Over the course of the intervening years, I learned not to share too much negativity, no matter what I was feeling. I learned to create different groups of people who had different access to different posts so that I didn’t offend anyone or share anything with people I didn’t want to see it.  (I’ve since let that go. Too much work.) I learned how to do invites and even fumbled through creating a public business page. I started Instagram (no regrets! I love the ‘gram) and linked it to my page. I even took a Facebook break for lent once! But I didn’t post about it and ‘warn’ everyone beforehand. I knew enough by then to realize that pretty much no one would care.

There are things about social media that are wonderful. When Dean and I moved to Nashville and our apartment immediately caught fire, we had so many offers to help that I was moved to tears frequently. It’s also a great place to crowdsource for personal recommendations. “Hey, friends with pets in Nashville! What vets do you use?” I am in better contact with friends in other states and countries than I would be otherwise. There are friends from my past that I’ve reconnected with and even become closer to because of what we’ve shared with each other through Facebook. I’ve stayed in contact with people longer than I would have naturally otherwise.

But is that always a good thing? 

I’ve gone through several life transitions, as is normal and natural. I do believe that some people are with us throughout one or more of those transitions and some people stay for life. Some people pop in and out, sometimes you lean on a certain group or individual more during certain times and then an entirely different group or person during others. Usually people fade in and out organically. I feel like social media pressures us to keep connections that maybe we wouldn’t otherwise, and this has the potential to damage the experience.

A few years ago, I started something that marketing gurus would most likely frown upon. I started cleaning up my personal Facebook page. When I do this, I make a post, offering up the link to my public business page to those who may not have it, and I’ll often send out an invite from the Business page as well with a message as to what I’m doing so people have the option. In the following few days, I’ll go through and remove ‘friends’ who I can’t remember where we met, haven’t really interacted with via the media, et cetera. There’s nothing personal in these removals. Usually it’s just people who I feel aren’t really interested in my personal life, if they secretly really are and were just lurking and not interacting, then they still can join my professional page, read the blogs and message me if they like. Who knows, if we start interacting, they could always port back over to the personal page in the future. But honestly, I just started feeling weird sharing so much of myself with people who, when you got down to it, didn’t really care what happened to me. I could have censored or recreated different ‘privacy’ settings, but I didn’t want to. I just wanted to share with people I wanted to share with.

Something interesting happened in 2019. I discovered the ‘snooze’ button.  You can snooze a contact for 30 days and they won’t show up in your feed at all.  I used this for a lot of people that I kept on the page as political contacts (that really should have gone to the professional page) but who I didn’t necessarily have positive interactions with. I had one of these contacts in particular who never interacted with me at all except to occasionally come onto my page to drop a snarky comment, usually about my lifestyle, and add a ‘just sayin’ at the end. Like that made it less judgey.  I dropped all of those people this year. I did the snooze, then after the thirty days was up and they reappeared, I realized how much I enjoyed not seeing those people in my feed! I would unfollow after the snooze, then at the start of the year, I decided, why even let them lurk? I figured, they know where my professional page is, and I’m done feeling obligated to stay ‘friends’ with someone who just snarks at me. And I’m done giving them access to my life.

Looks like I’m doing great, right? In reality, I was depressed. Some of it was weather depression, some of it was political. I had just had five classes taken away from me for no discernible reason. I was feeling incredibly pressured, was being told I was a sub par instructor and was being pressured to attend non-paid trainings to learn classes that I would never, ever be allowed to teach. Thankfully, I was also employed at other, prestigious gyms that felt I was exemplary, otherwise I may have given it up entirely.

There were some people I wasn’t sure about though. We didn’t necessarily have negative interactions, I didn’t have negative feelings toward them, but all they ever posted was memes or MLM stuff they wanted to sell, never really anything personal or relateable.  I ‘unfollowed’ one such person on my phone very recently. Immediately, this page came up that allowed me to unfollow multiple people at once if I wanted to. WOW. I didn’t have to search through my friend’s list and click on individual profile pictures and then go and hit ‘unfollow’ I could literally just scroll through this page with ease, click on profile pictures and bam. Unfollowed. Ruthless.

I decided to scroll through and try it out. My thought process being; maybe I’ll see how my thread algorithm changes when I only see the people I really want to see all the time! Maybe I’ll start interacting with those people more and we’ll connect more.  

Y’all.

For one thing, it turns out that many of the people I really want to talk to … don’t post that frequently. Some do, and I’m seeing those people A LOT. (I don’t like everything that they post, because I fear I would come off stalkery, so I’ve started trying to comment instead.) I also started seeing pages and groups that I’m a part of A LOT. So much so that I had to turn off notifications for some of them because the majority of my thread was postings from the groups. Then I started seeing pages that I had ‘liked’ long ago but forgotten about. Sometimes that was cool. (StoryCorps! How have you been!) But it started feeling, kind of sparse.

The upside is that I’ve been on Facebook less.  And when I do go on, I’m seeing and interacting with people that I completely enjoy.  But it got me thinking… is this social media, or anti-social media? It’s made it so easy for me to … oust a swath of people and still ‘stay friends.’ I mean, yes, this way if I’m ever wondering about one of those people, I can just search them and see what they’re up to.  Hell, maybe I’ll miss them and ‘follow’ them again.

I started wondering what the point of it all is. Is it just to promote our own personal brand to as many people as possible? Why? Why not just use LinkedIn if we’re looking for jobs. If you’re a celebrity of some kind, that’s different also, but I’m sure you have a private and a public page. I enjoy sharing my blogs, but I post them on both my private and public pages. I’m positive that only close friends and family really check them out from my private page and anyone who I don’t really know has found it through my public page, or on a few occasions, through Instagram. And I’m going to keep writing, regardless of who reads. Yes, it really, really makes me feel great when someone gets something out of what I write because i feel like I’m giving back, but honestly, I don’t know that I could ever stop writing.

Never gonna give. you. up!

I took a look through some other faucets of Facebook today. The ads. What they’ve done with my information. Why they’re showing me certain types of ads. I was able to un-click several things. (Including Donald Trump? Like. Why. Why was he on there. I don’t think I’ve ever even mentioned him anywhere until now. I never even watched The Apprentice. Remember when that was just a fun lark?) But SOooooo many politicians that I had no idea about where in there. Lots of ‘interests’ including ‘Fat’. Fat? Okay.

There is a place that you can download all of your Facebook information at any time. You can also delete all of that information and cancel your account in the same place. I thought about it. What am I really doing here?

Then I thought about my friends and family in different states. My friends in England. Canada. France. So forth. I like being able to look at them every now and then. My friend Tom in England sends me pictures of his Penguin bars because I get ridiculously excited about the bad jokes. One of the riddle questions, which I guess at and never get, then one of the answer in the comments, which is always deliciously awful. We never get any likes or comments on those pictures, but I could care less. Because we’re connecting in a trivial, mundane, joyful, easy way that we would never be able to do otherwise. Yes, he could text me these pictures, but there’s something about posting publicly, ‘I am your friend, and I don’t care what anyone else thinks about it’ that’s a different gesture of love and affection that is specific to this day and age. And I’m not willing to give that up.