I'm Doing It All for ATTENTION!
social media, ego, and contemplation
After COVID, I spent a few years substitute teaching, mainly in an attempt to keep my kids’ elementary school from going virtual again. (The horror!) Subbing in art was my favorite, with the exception of kindergarten.
Don’t get me wrong, I adore five-year-olds, but what often happened in art class is that a swarm of them would develop around me—some wanting to show me a picture, some to tattle, and often somewhere in this maelstrom was a child who had managed to cut themselves with the safety scissors and was actively bleeding. And it was up to me to sort through these children, whose names I didn’t know, and triage their needs. Because, to a five-year-old, a pretty picture and a bleeding finger are equally urgent.
This is the best analogy I can come up with for what social media feels like these days: friends, acquaintances, and strangers all struggling for my attention. Friends announcing major milestones are sandwiched between AI-generated videos and influencers promising (and generally withholding) their BEST weight-loss and anti-aging tips!!! Everything is flattened: a post by my dad might be buried below some dumb meme page.
When I joined Facebook 20 years ago, it was equivalent to the white boards we put on our dorm room doors, a place to leave messages on each other’s “walls.” It was a shortcut to connecting with the cutie in your math class and a way to chat your out-of-state ex to rehash your high school break up for the dozenth time. The platform was only for college students at the time, which is probably why we thought it was a great idea to post sooooooooo many drunk photos.
In the wake of Trump’s inauguration, during which he prominently displayed of his collection of tech CEOs, questioning the costs and benefits of social media feels very zeitgeisty. Anne Helen Petersen wrote a great post exploring reasons to leave social media, and several Instagram-famous people I follow have noisily left.
For years I made the excuse, “I would leave social media, except that I need to promote my writing.” It’s true that whenever I have a publication come out, it’s strongly encouraged that I share it on various platforms. (The same goes for authors when they land book deals—social media promotion is sometimes even written into their contracts.) I’ve done workshops on social media marketing and used Buffer to schedule my posts at the optimal times, and it turns out, these have had very little impact on my readership. Due to ever-changing algorithmic preferences and the absolute glut of influencers, capturing the attention of users grows harder every year.
But the real reason I didn’t leave? My ego. Who is immune to the feeling of likes rolling in on your latest post? Who doesn’t want to inspire just the right mixture of envy and adoration amongst your social circles?
But getting a “like” is a cheap substitute for what I really want, which is to be seen. Having someone send a laugh reaction or a comment can’t compare to sitting across the table from a friend and having them really listen to what’s going on in your life. And social media comes with a side of jealousy, judgment, and outrages—some real, some ginned up. It’s engineered to be both addictive and shallow. And those are two words I don’t want defining my life.
So this month, I’m giving up my social media accounts. Partly inspired by reading Shannon K. Evans’ The Mystics Would Like a Word I want to rethink where and how I spend my attention. Here are some questions I have:
Do I need social media, professionally?
How does social media help or hurt my relationships?
What are the benefits of boredom?
Is it realistic to fit more in-person interaction into an already busy life?
Is all this busyness drowning out the voice of the divine?
How can I build more contemplation into my life?
Where Big Tech has striven to make my life frictionless and flat, I find I miss the texture (and even inconvenience) of an in-person life. I want to reject the learned helplessness of scrolling through outrage after outrage.
If teaching kindergarten taught me anything, it’s that we cannot live in a constant state of emergency.
Have you been rethinking your online life lately? Do you have any rules for yourself around social media or killing time online? Any wisdom for me on the topic of ‘attention’? I’d love to hear your advice, questions, and petty gripes in the comments.
I’ve been up for two hours since 4am pointlessly doom scrolling in an attempt to make sense of the world (I tell myself). I am no closer to understanding any other single person, I’m annoyed, I’m paranoid, and I’m anxious, and now I am lacking in sleep anticipating a very busy day. Your timing is all too perfect.
I totally understand where you're coming from, but I've got a radically different take on social media. I think, like most things, the role of things like FB depend a lot on how you use them. As someone who's newly geographically isolated from all of my friends (and even former acquaintances!) via a necessary move to rural PA, and whose brain injury often makes it hard to leave the house, I find a great deal of solace in connecting with friends and family - literally hearing and seeing what they're doing via Insta and FB, etc. (Meeting in noisy, crowded places like restaurants is almost impossible now.) I would lose touch with the vast majority of people I know if I went off social media; I'm already isolated by having to quit my job as a professor (which I loved!). There's just no way to stay connected that's as effective or efficient - and the visual component is SO important to me. I know a lot of other disabled folks feel the same way - and are also worried about losing the ability to organize and communicate about stuff that's happening on the ground that isn't being reported by most news outlets. Just another perspective!