The Belly of the Beast
Holding my nose and diving into social media!
I stopped actively engaging with social media back in 2017, when I took a sabbatical from all social media platforms for one year. When I came back to social media, I didn’t feel the pull to share my life on the internet anymore. During my social media sabbatical, my communication had changed from connecting with the masses by posting on social media to connecting one-on-one or with small groups of people—and I embraced this change after the sabbatical had ended. Instead of posting short pithy posts, I focused on sharing my thoughts through longform writing in this newsletter and elsewhere.
Knowing that I’m someone who can quickly become engrossed with social media, I have spent the last four years staying far, far away. I knew it was my kryptonite, so I shielded myself from the compulsion by deleting the apps from my phone. The thing with social media is that, if you don’t engage, it loses its power. The power of social media comes from the addictive loop that is created by engaging with your audience, which then leads to more engagement—and the cycle repeats itself endlessly. For example, last week tons of people were tweeting about leaving Twitter, but then they kept sticking around to read the comments on their post about leaving Twitter. It’s called a feedback loop, and it does what it sets out to do: keep you glued to the apps.
Of course, I have never stopped thinking, reading, learning and writing about social media. I find the phenomenon endlessly fascinating, although I watch it all unfold as if I’m witnessing a car accident happen in slow motion. Social media’s hold on our society is fascinating and hugely distressing at the same time. And yet, we cannot deny that it is here to stay, so we better learn to live with it.
These last five years, my way of living with social media has been to keep it at arm’s length. If I didn’t let social media into my world, I wouldn’t have to do the tough work of developing a healthy relationship with it.
With that distance, a serious self-consciousness has emerged. In the fifteen years that I used social media before my sabbatical, sharing my life with friends and strangers on the internet was easy and effortless. The social media landscape has obviously evolved since the days of LiveJournal in the early 2000s; we’re living in a world where posting on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook has become people’s full-time job. Social media has become more about branding and less about personal connection.
I no longer felt comfortable sharing my personal life with strangers on the internet, especially after I became a mother. And I didn’t feel comfortable with the marketing side of social media either; turning my identity and person into a brand was not something that appealed to me.
For the past few years, I didn’t feel like I was missing anything by keeping a distance from social media. Lately, that feeling has changed. I have big ideas. I have big career goals. And the truth of the matter is simple: you cannot achieve a certain kind of success in today’s world without social media.
I have been ruminating on this conundrum for a long time. My focus is on digital health—how do we stay sane in a world of screens and pings and real-time analytics? The people that I want to reach are on the platforms. And yet, I am not.
Over time, it has become more and more clear to me that I need to develop a social media presence in order to achieve my current career goals. This scares me! I find it mortifying to admit that I want to gain an audience on social media. Of course, it’s what I’m trying to do in this newsletter, but I can sort of hide behind the black and white letters. Writing has felt safe to me, the easier alternative to putting myself out there.
What makes compelling content on social media? Authentic, personal content. Showing up with your REAL self. I realize that part of my hesitation about delving into social media (apart from the fact that I know how much time and energy it consumes to be on those apps, and I have strived to spend as little time and energy as possible on screens) is that I’m afraid of putting my face out there, to be upfront, personal—to be vulnerable. I have no problem showing those sides of myself to my loved ones, but to a sea of strangers? To put myself in the position of being judged by countless faceless people on the internet?
If I don’t put myself out there, I can’t be judged. What if put myself out there and no one LIKES me and my “content”?
Plus, I am out of practice. I simply don’t know the nuts and bolts of using these apps effectively, in a way that will attract followers. And I am fully aware of how much WORK social media is. Not only is it time consuming, but the algorithm doesn’t work if you use the apps like a billboard. You can’t put up a post and walk away. You have to engage – and it’s that engagement that worries me. It’s the way it sucks you in. I want to use social media as a tool, but I know enough about social media to know that it’s not that easy.
And so, after countless experiments around limiting my access to social media and the internet, I am embarking on a new experiment: putting effort into my social media presence in the hopes of gaining an audience. Here’s the caveat – WITHOUT losing my mind. Follow me as I descend into the belly of the beast… and add me on Instagram and TikTok!
Thanks for being along for the ride!