Today’s prompt from Long and Short Reviews is “What are your thoughts on social media”, which is an interesting topic for me because I think about it quite a lot and consider myself a minimalist in regards to its use. I was lucky enough to read Neil Postman at an early age, particularly his Amusing Ourselves to Death and Technopoly, which made me aware that technology is not neutral — that it carries its own meanings sometimes. The idea that smart phones exist, for instance, allowing us to be contacted any time, lends itself to the idea that we should be contactable at all time — and the ability to share any and everything hastens this idea that everything can and should be turned into a sharable experience. Dave Eggers takes this attitude towards its logical extreme with the motto of his social media uber-company, The Every, in the book of the same name: Sharing is Caring, Privacy is Theft, Secrets are Lies.

I view social media as something that can be used in positive ways, but which has an inevitable orientation towards unhealthy behavior. I think someone has to be aggressively mindful to use social media is only good ways: for instance, I curate my facebook feed so that I’m only seeing updates from organizations I’m genuinely interested in, as well as my closest friends and family — and even some of them don’t make the list, because they post bumpersticker memes all day. I think ‘normal’ social media use deforms us in ways, making us too focused on things that don’t matter, and allowing our worse selves — angry selves, mopey selves, despairing selves, vicious selves — to dominate, because the nature of The Feed fertililizes and waters those selves far more easily than our better, disciplined angels.This is why my reddit feed is also curated so that I’m only following innocuous topics like PC gaming, bird photography, and the like — staying well clear of politics, though some people in literary subreddits love to introduce it.

Even when we’re chasing good things — trying to capture and share a wonderful experience — I fear we do it so much that we cheapen the experience, that seeing something wonderful becomes less of a soul-moment and more of a work moment, so that it becomes perfunctory, almost obligatory. Think of a concert full of people with their phones raised, more vested in Capturing the Moment than experiencing the moment — or someone who visits a cathedral like St. Augustine in Santa Fe, and instead of sitting in silence and letting the awe penetrate their marrow, instead goes around taking pictures of every single window and bob of decoration because It Has to Be Captured. Erich Fromm has written on this a bit in his To Have or To Be — not on social media, obviously, but the underlying impulse. I also make it deliberately harder for myself to access social media by not having any apps on my phone save for Instagram. All the foregoing, mind, is purely about the one-on-one experience, to say nothing of the way that phone addiction — which is often social media addiction — has completely transformed (i.e. brutally beaten into oblivion ) social occasions. I’d say call me a boomer, but these days the older adults are as bad as the kids about staring at phones while in company — or answering the phone at a table with people.

Anyhoo, if you are interested in this topic, I would recccommend Freya India’s piece on how social media use changes us, her piece “The World We Never Knew” on Gen-Z’s nostalgia for a world before chronic hyperstimulation, as well as books like The Chaos Machine or Hamlet’s Blackberry.