In late summer 2019, I watched The Great Hack, a Netflix documentary about Cambridge Analytica, a big data mining and analysis company, and their involvement in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. My abridged takeaway is that social media companies, particularly Facebook, allowed Cambridge Analytica to use security loopholes to collect an overwhelming amount of data from users and their networks, and then they generated targeted ads to influence the election. Learning the details about Cambridge Analytica’s nefarious data collection techniques and election influence was the final straw in my growing desire to move completely away from social media. That part of my journey was documented in this post.
Right around the time that I wrote that post, I deleted most of my social media accounts: Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. I no longer wanted an account on a platform where I was a product instead of a customer, and where I would be exposed to targeted personalized digital ads. I recognized that I couldn’t have a life that was completely free from these kinds of ads, but spending less time on those platforms while paying for ad-free access to media through Spotify, Netflix, and YouTube Premium could at least minimize my exposure.
Leaving Facebook, however, was a bigger dilemma. I was connected with nearly a thousand people and Facebook was my only communication channel to many of them so I gave myself until the end of October to collect email addresses and phone numbers. Then I pulled the plug.
How’s It Going?
As 2020 ramps up, I’ve been mostly social media free for a quarter of a year and completely social media free for a little over two months. Like the last time I stepped back from social media a few years ago, everything is just fine. It took me a few weeks to stop habitually opening a new browser tab and typing “fa” into the address bar anytime my brain wanted a distraction. And it took a few weeks to start leaving my phone in my pocket when I would find myself at the end of a long line at the bank or the grocery store. But all of those instincts and urges eventually faded away. Frankly, and honestly, I don’t miss social media at all.
Drawbacks
There are definitely drawbacks to being social media free. First, it becomes very obvious that most local businesses, venues, artists, etc. are only (or primarily) promoting their events, goods, and services through social channels. In many cases, after companies push out events or promotions on social, their websites and email lists are left to collect dust. Social media became a powerful place to promote things in the early 2010s, and the limited capacity of small organizations inhibits how much overall promotion they can do. Social still wins, even if the latest algorithms mean less exposure or higher costs per click.
A second drawback that I’ve experienced being social media free is the amplification of how many people are addicted to the infinite feed. If you ever quit smoking you’ve likely experienced a similar phenomena. When you quit, you can suddenly smell cigarette smoke a mile away. You notice every single person standing on a street corner puffing away. Your senses are tuned in to that thing you crave, but you can no longer have. It’s the same when you go on a diet and realize how often you’re around sweets or how many times your offered some kind of food or drink that you’re no longer supposed to have. When I quit social media, I eventually lost the urge to constantly look at my phone. I even recently forgot it at home while heading out for a couple hours to get lunch and didn’t even notice until I was almost back.
Because I’m not looking down at my phone as much as I used to, I now notice how often everyone else is, which can be frustrating. But in the same way that I vowed to never be a militant non-smoker, I’m not going to become militant about my changing relationship with technology. These changes work for me, and that’s what I’m concerned about at this point.
Regrets
None. I’m glad I pulled the plug and I don’t have any desire to undo it. I’m learning that by spending a little energy curating my email subscriptions and inbox and following the right blogs, I can get all of the information I need about what’s happening with my favorite bands, artists, and venues. Even if I miss something every now and again, it’s not worth the trade off of hours and hours spent wasted scrolling and scrolling and scrolling.
Even more important than keeping up with my interests, I’ve been focusing more and more attention on real life relationships. I’m more intentional about connecting with local friends face to face, and calling long-distance friends to catch up. It has taken me time and energy to revert some of those habits and patterns, but I do find that I prefer fewer quality connections than the high quantity social media connections that don’t have as much meaning.
Am I Becoming Jamish?
During a recent face-to-face conversation with some friends, we were talking about the arc of personal technology use since the mid-1990s. We talked about the Internet, personal computers, cell phones, smart phones, and social media, and how these technologies have evolved over the years, along with the effect we feel they have had on society and culture. Sometime in the early 2000s, probably around the time that high speed Internet became accessible to most people, I feel like technology crossed over from simply maximizing the efficiency of existing media and communication norms to heading down a slippery slope of overuse, overconnectivity, and negative cultural side effects.
Through the 1980s and 1990s advances in technology seemed to just make the shit we already did better, faster, and more convenient. For example, as a musician, by the end of the 1990s I could make high quality recordings in my home, press them onto CDs, a high quality digital format, and share them with other musicians from around the world, who I connected with through websites and email. The process was essentially the same as it always was, only easier, faster, and less expensive. Leading up to those advances, I would have either recorded music on lower quality devices or paid a lot of money to use a professional recording studio. I would have replicated the music on cassettes, a lower quality format, and I would have shared the music with a much smaller network of musicians that I may have met through printed zines or through personal connections. Same process. It just got better.
At some point, though, technology evolved to change processes around communication and media. Access to unlimited, on-demand digital media has devalued the results of the creative processes used to make them. Social media platforms that allow anyone to publish anything, at any time, to the entire world has devalued the process of publishing. And it has removed quality controls that were essential to traditional publishing like research, fact checking, and corroborating evidence. The unlimited ability to communicate in tiny bursts with anyone at anytime has devalued our conversations. And the ability to always be connected to everything has devalued critical healthy activities like taking breaks, enjoying down time, and relaxing.
We crossed a threshold from doing the things we had always done in a faster and more efficient way, to always being on and always being connected with unlimited access to anything we want, anytime we want it. Technology has not just enhanced our behavior, technology has dramatically changed our behavior, and I feel that the consequences are overall more negative than positive.
Like the Amish, who inhabit much of the county where I live, and who avoid technology that has a negative effect on their community, I’m looking back at what I have consumed over the past 25 years and I’m recognizing what has negatively affected my own community, my own relationships, my own creativity, and my own well being. I have realized that my move away from social media is part of a bigger plan to move away from any technology that doesn’t serve me well. It’s a first step toward finding the right moment in the evolution of my personal technology use, reclaiming the aspects of technology that have served me well at that point, and eradicating the rest of it from my life.
I don’t have any intention of becoming Amish, but perhaps I am becoming Jamish. More to come on this new evolution, or de-evolution as it were.