After years of high-level, near-constant social media use, I’m going back to my blog for writing. Here’s a list of reasons in no particular order.
Social media has become unproductive.
There was a time, pre-2016’s election cycle, that I hosted near-daily Facebook conversations on a horde of subjects: politics, sciences, news, the Bible. It didn’t matter. Conversations were often long and involved. Often there was sharp disagreement. But, people could engage, be presented with facts and alternative views, and often even—GASP—changed their minds.
That scenario is so rare now it’s a hole-in-one in a hailstorm with geese standing on the green. Both Twitter and Facebook are tribalistic. Disagreement tends toward mockery, derision, and hate. And the truth is, social media depends on amping up people’s emotions to keep them coming back. Things are only getting worse in this election cycle; I do not want to contribute to or succumb to the divisiveness.
I’m tired of my writing making money for Facebook and Twitter.
My non-scientific observation is everyone who writes in the digital space depends on social media for most of their readership—just try and find a website that has no social sharing buttons. For several years, I’ve bypassed my blog and posted my writing directly to Twitter or Facebook, creating income for them by supplying them with free ad revenue. While I am not leaving social media entirely, it will become for me a means to promote the content I create elsewhere and own myself. Jack and Mark have more than enough money; neither needs my charity.
New posts will have a “tip jar” at the bottom if you choose to use it, so I, rather than billionaires, can be paid for my content.
I’m not sure what social media is doing to my brain, or yours.
Even before The Social Dilemma was released, there were already concerns that social media is addictive and that it rewires our brains. In this 2014 video produced by UCLA, for instance, Dr Dan Siegel of UCLA explains how our physical brains are restructured by social media.
Facebook’s first president, Sean Parker (also inventor of the once über-popular file sharing program, Napster) expressed concerns in 2017 about physical and psychological impact.
I don’t know if I really understood the consequences of what I was saying, because [of] the unintended consequences of a network when it grows to a billion or 2 billion people and…it literally changes your relationship with society, with each other…It probably interferes with productivity in weird ways. God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains. The thought process that went into building these applications, Facebook being the first of them, … was all about: ‘How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?’ And that means that we need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever. And that’s going to get you to contribute more content, and that’s going to get you…more likes and comments. It’s a social-validation feedback loop…exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.
I might be addicted.
Many of us joke about being addicted to social media, but what if it’s true? What if we are experiencing a softer addiction than opioids or crack, but just as real? Why is it that we cannot go longer than a few minutes without reaching for our phones? And this is coming from a guy who has never had social media notifications turned on.
Documentaries like The Social Dilemma and The Great Hack demonstrate how companies rig the game against their users to keep us coming back for more interactions. It used to be when an outside force controlled a person’s unconscious and conscious behavior we called it possession. I am beginning to wonder…
Writing for Northrop Grumman’s Now, Kelly McSweeny says,
Neuroscientists are studying the effects of social media on the brain and finding that positive interactions (such as someone liking your tweet) trigger the same kind of chemical reaction that is caused by gambling and recreational drugs.
According to an article by Harvard University researcher Trevor Haynes, when you get a social media notification, your brain sends a chemical messenger called dopamine along a reward pathway, which makes you feel good. Dopamine is associated with food, exercise, love, sex, gambling, drugs … and now, social media.
This is Your Brain on Instagram: Effects of Social Media on the Brain
To combat this I’ll be taking a break from social media beginning October 1 through the election. Posts here will auto-publish to social media, but I won’t be manually pushing them out. Y’all gonna have to elect a president without my input. ;^)
I need my attention span back.
The overall impact of social media on reading is debated. After all, much of social media is reading. But I have noticed a very specific effect: I struggle to read long articles or books for lengthy periods. Usually—not sometimes—when I get to the fourth or fifth paragraph of an article or blog post I scroll to see how long it is. It it’s longer that a couple of more paragraphs, I’m off to the next thing. Sadly, I am not alone.
[T]he average person checks their phone around 50 times a day. Constant digital engagement has seen our attention dwindle, and we’ve now slipped behind the humble goldfish; in 2000 the average attention span was 12 seconds – it has since fallen to a dismal eight, just below a goldfish’s nine.
How social media has left us with a lower attention span than a goldfish
Clearly shortened attention spans were an issue before social media—remember the concerns when MTV pioneered music videos with quick-edits throughout. But since I am the only one who controls my social media usage, it is up to me to take action. (No, the app timer thing on my phone has not helped, other than reminding that I spend too much time surfing.)
I want to be able to write again for the glory of God.
There was a time when I could write several well-researched, content-rich blog posts a week. Now I’m doing good to write a few a year. (That’s no exaggeration.) Whether or not anyone reads I need to write, and I need to write as a form of worshipping God. The great film director Ingmar Bergman, himself not a believer, said:
Regardless of my own beliefs and my own doubts…it is my opinion that art lost its basic creative drive the moment it was separated from worship. It severed an umbilical cord and now lives its own sterile life, generating and degenerating itself…Thus if I am asked what I would like the general purpose of my fils to be, I would reply that I want to be one of the artists in the cathedral on the great plain.
quoted in The Cross Before Me, Wilbourne & Gregor, p 78–79
The temptation to write, podcast, preach, teach, or be on social media to be noticed, heard, respected and the like is immense. Indeed it gave birth to an entire mindset, “platforming,” by which each person does everything in his or her own power to draw attention to themselves, their content, their brand, and the like. It is really hard to square putting one’s self first in everything at every opportunity with putting one’s self last at every opportunity, but here we are, quoth Jesus: the last shall be first, and the first will be last. Former president of Yale, Timothy Dwight, warned the graduates of the Class of 1814:
Selfishness is in its nature little and base. But no passion, and no pursuits, are more absolutely selfish than the love of distinction…Among all the passions, which mislead, endanger, and harass the mind, none is more hostile to its peace, none more blind, none more delirious, than the love of distinction.
The Cross Before Me, p 85
So, I’d love to have you read as I strive to glorify God in my writing. If you’d like to know when new posts go up, subscribe to the email alerts in the right sidebar. You only get an email when there is new content and only related to new content.
Coram Deo.
