2016-02-05»
Anti-SocialยปI gave up social media for a month, like Lent, yesterday. It was a whim, at heart — I realised I was bouncing like a Pong puck between the stress of work, to evading work by browsing media, to bouncing back off into work from the stress of reading my social media.
After years of gleeful woolgathering, my social media makes me anxious. The Internet and its people: watching them interact now is like watching parents fight. My friends argue, or steam in their own rage, or trot out simple words that provoke me into argument, even when I don’t know or can no longer care what their original intention was. Every tweet had become a poke in the guts. Every notification had me flinching.
Look at my hat! Am I bad for not liking your hat? Am I not liking your hat because it is just a hat, and I am not interested in a hat right now, but I feel pressured to “like” you hat?
These terrible things are happening. Are you angry at me for not doing more? Are you doing even less, and a hypocrite?
These kittens, I acknowledge, are cute. But what about that bad thing I just saw? Are you trying to confuse me?
So I signed off from Twitter and Facebook.
I kept Tumblr, because my Tumblr is a strange distant thing, of a small group of strangers in their twenties I randomly discovered. They are smart and happy and have carefully moderated their distance from the drama surrounding them, even on Tumblr. I watch like a sci-fi scientist might use tachyons to light up the post-apocalyptic tribes of her dismal future. What can I learn from them? Can I use their obvious intelligence and hyper-evolved adaption to their devastated world to change my own fate?
Ironically, the day after I forswore social media, I ended up physically *at* Twitter. @Twitter. There was a meeting to discuss keeping people safe from harassment, which is the absolute pinnacle of the stress I have. All my online hyperventilation comes from the expectation that one day, everything I say (including this paragraph) will be used against me. I sat and chatted with people so abraded by mass harassment that they had a kind of shine to them, a sensitivity and an invulnerability. We argued a bit. We don’t necessarily agree. It was really nice. We’d argue a bit, and then mutter sorry under our breaths, and then find more pleasant things in common to talk about.
I wish I could work out how to map that: that joy of shared communication over exaggerated gulfs, back onto my Internet again.
This bit of the Net still feels okay, at least. I’ll be making camp for the month at least. Maybe longer. I might not write, but I’ll be doing some housekeeping. I’m not trying to be nostalgic. You can join me here if you like.