Wading through the online quagmire
Sep. 25th, 2020 10:11 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dolorosa_12Social media — and our relationship with it — is a topic that's been on my mind a lot recently, as more and more friends post about a) how unhappy it's making them and b) various vicious online blowups in their various social and professional circles. I've noticed many friends talking about how they're trying to figure out a healthy way to stay online while navigating these various miserable and treacherous waters.
Of course we are all different, but I wondered if it would be helpful to talk about my own experiences in these matters. I'm someone who's been enthusiastically online for around thirteen years, and a good portion of my social life has taken place across various social media platforms since then. But around a year and a half ago, I realised a lot of the gloss had worn off, and instead of being a happy place where I hung out with my friends, certain platforms were exacerbating my anxiety, to the point that I spent most days feeling either furious or so anxious that it made me physically ill. I spent most of the next eighteen months using a process of trial and error to arrive at a healthier way of being online. I'm not saying it will work for you, but here's what I did:
Firstly, I asked myself a few questions: why was I on various platforms, what did I like to see/do in those spaces, what sorts of content and activity made me feel unhappy.
My answer to the third question was the same across all platforms: frantic, despairing, angry discussions of politics, particularly if it took the form of a live feed/livetweets, discussing events (with much frenzied and panicked speculation) as they unfolded, rather than summarising or analysing them at length after they'd happened. In addition, I am someone who really, really hates being part of, or witnessing, debate. I know some of my friends find debating ideas an interesting intellectual exercise, a social activity, or something which gives them a satisfying rush of righteousness. For me, I get none of that — debates and conflict, even if they are being conducted in the calmest of terms, make me feel tense, panicked, and emotional. So, since I was using social media for almost solely social/personal reasons, just as I would try at all costs to avoid face-to-face situations that involved debates among friends, it seemed logical that avoiding such things in online social spaces would make me less miserable.
My answers to the first two questions differed from platform to platform, because I was using them for slightly different reasons, but by going through my online presence platform by platform I was able to change the way I used them to curate my experience and avoid the things I found unpleasant, as outlined in the above paragraph. I'll go through the sites one by one.
Dreamwidth: I use Dreamwidth because mid-2000s era Livejournal was basically the internet at its best for me: longform blogging, a community of enthusiastic commenters who replied at length, the ability to create communities based on interests, the ability to control access to what you posted, no retweet/share/reblog button, a chronological feed, no ads, and no selling of user data. Dreamwidth remains this kind of paradise. To be honest, I didn't need to change anything about how I was using it — except that I made a conscious effort to use it more, to post frequently, and with content that invited discussion and conversation, to comment on other people's posts, to make that longform style of blogging my primary form of online activity. I consider it to be my online home base.
Facebook: I'm on Facebook to stay in touch with friends and family, and I view it as essentially a gigantic, online living room or dining room table, with an ever-changing collection of guests. I'm here because I want to hear about people's hobbies, families, pets, holidays, successes and challenges with work, and, to an extremely limited extent, engagement with politics. I'm not here to witness or participate in lengthy, wearying arguments. I recognised that I couldn't control how OTHER people were using Facebook, and so I ruthlessly curated my feed: I muted everyone who had a tendency to use Facebook to debate and argue with their friends, I filtered every post I made so that those most likely to argue with me wouldn't see them, and immediately this place became much more relaxing. The one thing I haven't figured out how to block is seeing friends arguing in the comments sections of e.g. Guardian posts to Facebook, the comments sections of groups of which they're members, and so on (some of them really, really love arguing in the comments section!), beyond hiding individual posts as they appear, or blocking the entire group/organisation's posts. These curatorial decisions are very much an ongoing project — I tend to operate a three strikes and you're out policy, so I'm constantly revising whose posts I see. Probably next on my list of people to mute are those who just post screenshots of old Twitter, Tumblr or Reddit posts whose source is unclear, and without any contextualising comments of their own. As I say, people are free to use Facebook as they like, and it's my responsibility to curate my feed.
Instagram: much more straightforward. I'm here because I like to look at pretty pictures. The only people I follow there are friends and family, and strangers who post beautiful photos of stuff I like looking at: gardens, nature, food, books, and stationery. I try to keep this platform an oasis of calm, so if any strangers I follow suddenly pivot to constant political posting, I simply unfollow and move on.
Twitter: has been the biggest challenge of all. For much of the past eighteen months, my only solution has been to simply not use it at all, because it made me have endless panic attacks. I haven't looked at it for over a month, and before that I think I went for about three months without using it. My problem with Twitter is that I started using it at the point where the rhetoric in my online social circles was very much a) Twitter is the best way to keep yourself informed of current affairs and b) if you're not feeling upset and angry and challenged by the online company you keep, you've created a privileged bubble for yourself and are actively contributing to oppression. (I now kind of think both of these things are nonsense: there are better ways to remain informed of current affairs than Twitter, and there are certainly better ways to fight for social justice than to listen to a lot of people screaming in despair on Twitter.) My main problem about leaving Twitter altogether is that a large part of my online social circle is solely on that platform. I've been thinking a lot about ways to navigate this, and am tentatively coming up with a plan to go there once a week (probably Sunday mornings), not look at my feed at all, and just chat to anyone who's around about whatever's been happening in their lives. I'm going to test that as an experiment starting in October.
I'm on a couple of other platforms in a very superficial way, but those four are the main ones, and the changes I've made in the past eighteen months have proved really, really helpful. I'm much less angry, I'm much less anxious, and I actually feel like I have a lot more time and energy, even though I'm probably online just as much as I was before. I'm not suggesting that everyone should exactly follow what I did. But I do think that a lot of people would find it helpful to do a sort of mental audit of their social media usage — what they're trying to achieve by being on each platform, what makes them unhappy, and whether there are any steps they can take in terms of curating their presence and feed to remove that unhappiness. It may be as extreme as leaving certain platforms altogether, or it may be smaller tweaks are all that's needed.
I would also say that it is helpful to remove the sense of guilt you might feel at no longer bearing constant, immediate, real-time witness to all the iniquities of the world. We on the more leftwing side of the political spectrum have been somewhat indoctrinated that this is the morally responsible thing to do, and that not doing so makes you weak, cowardly, in denial, or actively doing harm. I would counter that and say that witnessing this constant, international, online live feed of horrors wears us down and makes it harder for people to do the work to fight against such horrors. Ask yourself: what is actually more likely to achieve concrete results — glueing yourself to Twitter and frantically retweeting things about every political and social iniquity in your entire country (or the entire world), or focusing with laser-like attention on a single cause, problem or issue, and taking concrete steps (writing letters, making donations, connecting relevant people, running for office or supporting those who are) to solve it?
Of course we are all different, but I wondered if it would be helpful to talk about my own experiences in these matters. I'm someone who's been enthusiastically online for around thirteen years, and a good portion of my social life has taken place across various social media platforms since then. But around a year and a half ago, I realised a lot of the gloss had worn off, and instead of being a happy place where I hung out with my friends, certain platforms were exacerbating my anxiety, to the point that I spent most days feeling either furious or so anxious that it made me physically ill. I spent most of the next eighteen months using a process of trial and error to arrive at a healthier way of being online. I'm not saying it will work for you, but here's what I did:
Firstly, I asked myself a few questions: why was I on various platforms, what did I like to see/do in those spaces, what sorts of content and activity made me feel unhappy.
My answer to the third question was the same across all platforms: frantic, despairing, angry discussions of politics, particularly if it took the form of a live feed/livetweets, discussing events (with much frenzied and panicked speculation) as they unfolded, rather than summarising or analysing them at length after they'd happened. In addition, I am someone who really, really hates being part of, or witnessing, debate. I know some of my friends find debating ideas an interesting intellectual exercise, a social activity, or something which gives them a satisfying rush of righteousness. For me, I get none of that — debates and conflict, even if they are being conducted in the calmest of terms, make me feel tense, panicked, and emotional. So, since I was using social media for almost solely social/personal reasons, just as I would try at all costs to avoid face-to-face situations that involved debates among friends, it seemed logical that avoiding such things in online social spaces would make me less miserable.
My answers to the first two questions differed from platform to platform, because I was using them for slightly different reasons, but by going through my online presence platform by platform I was able to change the way I used them to curate my experience and avoid the things I found unpleasant, as outlined in the above paragraph. I'll go through the sites one by one.
Dreamwidth: I use Dreamwidth because mid-2000s era Livejournal was basically the internet at its best for me: longform blogging, a community of enthusiastic commenters who replied at length, the ability to create communities based on interests, the ability to control access to what you posted, no retweet/share/reblog button, a chronological feed, no ads, and no selling of user data. Dreamwidth remains this kind of paradise. To be honest, I didn't need to change anything about how I was using it — except that I made a conscious effort to use it more, to post frequently, and with content that invited discussion and conversation, to comment on other people's posts, to make that longform style of blogging my primary form of online activity. I consider it to be my online home base.
Facebook: I'm on Facebook to stay in touch with friends and family, and I view it as essentially a gigantic, online living room or dining room table, with an ever-changing collection of guests. I'm here because I want to hear about people's hobbies, families, pets, holidays, successes and challenges with work, and, to an extremely limited extent, engagement with politics. I'm not here to witness or participate in lengthy, wearying arguments. I recognised that I couldn't control how OTHER people were using Facebook, and so I ruthlessly curated my feed: I muted everyone who had a tendency to use Facebook to debate and argue with their friends, I filtered every post I made so that those most likely to argue with me wouldn't see them, and immediately this place became much more relaxing. The one thing I haven't figured out how to block is seeing friends arguing in the comments sections of e.g. Guardian posts to Facebook, the comments sections of groups of which they're members, and so on (some of them really, really love arguing in the comments section!), beyond hiding individual posts as they appear, or blocking the entire group/organisation's posts. These curatorial decisions are very much an ongoing project — I tend to operate a three strikes and you're out policy, so I'm constantly revising whose posts I see. Probably next on my list of people to mute are those who just post screenshots of old Twitter, Tumblr or Reddit posts whose source is unclear, and without any contextualising comments of their own. As I say, people are free to use Facebook as they like, and it's my responsibility to curate my feed.
Instagram: much more straightforward. I'm here because I like to look at pretty pictures. The only people I follow there are friends and family, and strangers who post beautiful photos of stuff I like looking at: gardens, nature, food, books, and stationery. I try to keep this platform an oasis of calm, so if any strangers I follow suddenly pivot to constant political posting, I simply unfollow and move on.
Twitter: has been the biggest challenge of all. For much of the past eighteen months, my only solution has been to simply not use it at all, because it made me have endless panic attacks. I haven't looked at it for over a month, and before that I think I went for about three months without using it. My problem with Twitter is that I started using it at the point where the rhetoric in my online social circles was very much a) Twitter is the best way to keep yourself informed of current affairs and b) if you're not feeling upset and angry and challenged by the online company you keep, you've created a privileged bubble for yourself and are actively contributing to oppression. (I now kind of think both of these things are nonsense: there are better ways to remain informed of current affairs than Twitter, and there are certainly better ways to fight for social justice than to listen to a lot of people screaming in despair on Twitter.) My main problem about leaving Twitter altogether is that a large part of my online social circle is solely on that platform. I've been thinking a lot about ways to navigate this, and am tentatively coming up with a plan to go there once a week (probably Sunday mornings), not look at my feed at all, and just chat to anyone who's around about whatever's been happening in their lives. I'm going to test that as an experiment starting in October.
I'm on a couple of other platforms in a very superficial way, but those four are the main ones, and the changes I've made in the past eighteen months have proved really, really helpful. I'm much less angry, I'm much less anxious, and I actually feel like I have a lot more time and energy, even though I'm probably online just as much as I was before. I'm not suggesting that everyone should exactly follow what I did. But I do think that a lot of people would find it helpful to do a sort of mental audit of their social media usage — what they're trying to achieve by being on each platform, what makes them unhappy, and whether there are any steps they can take in terms of curating their presence and feed to remove that unhappiness. It may be as extreme as leaving certain platforms altogether, or it may be smaller tweaks are all that's needed.
I would also say that it is helpful to remove the sense of guilt you might feel at no longer bearing constant, immediate, real-time witness to all the iniquities of the world. We on the more leftwing side of the political spectrum have been somewhat indoctrinated that this is the morally responsible thing to do, and that not doing so makes you weak, cowardly, in denial, or actively doing harm. I would counter that and say that witnessing this constant, international, online live feed of horrors wears us down and makes it harder for people to do the work to fight against such horrors. Ask yourself: what is actually more likely to achieve concrete results — glueing yourself to Twitter and frantically retweeting things about every political and social iniquity in your entire country (or the entire world), or focusing with laser-like attention on a single cause, problem or issue, and taking concrete steps (writing letters, making donations, connecting relevant people, running for office or supporting those who are) to solve it?
no subject
Date: 2020-09-25 08:01 pm (UTC)I think the anxiety a lot of us are feeling is a deliberate strategy on the part of the social network designers, too -- the more engaged you are, the more you post and comment and increase their revenue. Nobody in that setup gets wealthier when we're scrolling through all contented and calm.
Huh, that makes a lot of sense!
no subject
Date: 2020-09-25 10:07 pm (UTC)