The Thing About Socials

Last week, I wrote about how I made a new Instagram account, initially mirroring my old Glass account, but something that’s allowed to breathe on its own. Again, people I know personally were not seeing my posts on Glass, so I’m going where my people are. Long story short is I’m looking to quiet down my social media experience.

Instagram at its best is a place where you and your friends post still images of their lives. In a busy world, it’s a chance to sit back and see how people are doing without having to text everyone directly. In a way, it’s a bit passive-aggressive, but at least it’s not fully secretive. At its worst, it can be a noisy place full of flashing lights and people yelling in your face. To get more of the former and not the latter, you have to curate the hell out of it.

This goes to say having an account on a place owned by Meta and its list of issues from how it harvests personal data for its ad monetization models and general privacy concerns, to its effect on the self-esteem of teens (especially teen girls), to the Cambridge Analytica case and how it affected elections in the US, to the numerous antitrust cases pitted against the company— none of this makes having an account with this company necessarily feel good. It sucks; it kind of feels like a necessary evil. At the same time, nobody is holding a user hostage here. There are trade-offs. If I go all in with just having a personal website and nothing more, sure, I can feel good I’m not fueling a billion-dollar corporation that has nobody’s best interest in mind. But with that, I’m connecting with nobody on a local level. My friends have no clue unless I’m constantly advertising myself. Socials take the work out of it while making me a little less annoying.

I’ve made quality friendships from social media. I could rave all day how awesome the community from Lincoln, NE was on Twitter and how many people I met from that space. I’m still making friends from that community, even if we’ve moved to other services since. But I don’t like being on social media with the way it operates.

So, it’s a compromise. By making a new account, I get to see the people I want to see. We can stay caught up with each other. But with that, I’ll still plug this site. I invite my friends to check in often. I still dream of a connected network of friends who follow each other’s sites. If you have one, let me know. I still believe leaving social media would be the best option for everyone. But I also understand how that may feel like way more work than it’s worth, even if I can promise you the pros would outweigh the cons. Know I’m always down for coffee and a conversation. I'd love to see my friends in real life more.