My problem with Social Media (Take 6….I think….)

Over the last few years I have started and restarted a couple of posts that try to explain my dysfunctional relationship with mainstream social media platforms. Although I wanted to explain my disengagement and shout my stark warning of disingenuous self proclamation and feigned interested….I failed to put together my thoughts in any coherent or useful way.

My lack of interactions has done nothing to assist in me keeping meaningful contact with longstanding friends, relations and acquaintances….particularly since I chose to emigrate (just shy of ten years ago), uproot my life and immediate family, and to place myself in the ultimate “Do Not Disturb” in terms of distance and timezones. My decision and I’ll wear it.

It isn’t that I don’t want to stay in touch or enquire after the wellbeing of people I care about or to try to maintain friendly relations,….but I find it hard to find the time, focus or staying power to give the matter much thought. I am often in fear of giving away too much information and showing my emotional fragility, or leaving myself open to privacy attack. There is also normal cold-face paranoia in there as well….but thankfully I don’t find that as nearly as debilitating as I once did.

Personally I find the large mainstream Social Media networks gross to the extreme. The way they profit from activity targeting and providing such a mediocre view of what is really important. They really do bring out the worse in people, particularly myself. The friction, bile and self pomposity they surface, leaves the most disgusting aftertaste. I don’t see them as a way of bringing people together….but as a tool to separate and amplify difference with their self-echo sound-boarding.

(I also acknowledge that this whole post is an exercise in self pomposity of the highest order….but it is what I think!)

I have tried a few more niche social networks over the years, namely the Activity Pub friendly Micro.Blog, Reddit and to a lesser extent: early Twitter, but I have never formed a friendship or had so much as a meaningful conversation there…..I have used them only as a way to browse for funny pictures and minor self-proclamation (and even these small interludes have waned over the last eight years or so).

I often get the urge to regurgitate this type of thought-process to the written page, but only usually when I think I might have another try at keeping up a regular posting cadence…..a way of absolving all the bad thoughts out of my system, before finding something less dower and positive to scribble about….a way of explanation for my absence and a hope of understanding why I find this kind of activity difficult and usually short-lived.

Here’s to another rapid burst of writing, agonising about the response that never seems to come and then back into hibernation for another few years.