“Would you like to deactivate?” Check yes. “Can you tell us why you’re leaving?” Check I just need a break.
No one admits they are addicted to social media, because it is an addiction that is virtually unmet by social stigma. To most, there is nothing strange about making a deep social and emotional commitment to a world that no matter how devotedly one ventures towards, one can never really enter. I activated Twitter just shy of beginning high school, and in five months, I will be done with college. I have tweeted every single day for nearly a decade; a commitment unmatched by anything else in my life, and in all that time what do I have to show for it? 31.3 thousand drifting undeveloped thoughts, two thousand something dedicated (or not so much) followers, and admittedly a lot of wasted time.
This past month, as I’ve been reflecting much more heavily on who I am and where I belong, I decided to delete both my twitter and my instagram. Not permanently, as it’s no light thing to toss out a decade long archive of your own girlhood, but just temporarily enough so that it meant something. And in the twenty one days I spent without it, this is what it came to mean:
There is nothing social about social media.Social media is not an alternate kind of society, as we often like to believe. If it is, it is the worst kind of society: one that distills and propagates the most extreme political opinions; presents us with the most militant visual cultures of beauty, sexuality, and violence; and tells us not only to take this “world” at face value, but convinces us that we are building both active and effective communities with people who are being marketed the same algorithmic codas, and then purports these networks as friendship.
2. Most people believe they exercise much more discipline towards social media than they do. During my time off of social media, I found myself hyper aware of the effects that it has on actual society. Without the constant hand to mouth exercise of checking my phone on a constant basis, I became more cognizant of just how much time the average person spends on their phone; not just while alone but in large social gatherings as well. Social media makes people believe their immediate social realities to be inadequate, and serves to effectively replace them by turning real life into a mere object to be shared on social media, which markets itself to be much more personal, interesting, modern, and real than the reality that exists before you.
3. Social media was the worst possible thing for my life as an artist. Though social media has built me a kind of following among similar minds that I don’t take for granted, it also made it so that I could not produce the caliber of work I wanted to produce as a writer and visual artist. I found my creative self constantly tethered to a trending topic or pre-conceived audience. I was always creating with my followers in mind: “Will they understand me? Will they like this?” Without even knowing it, my writing became a product, and the artistic honesty I had always prided myself on became an aside.
Rather than producing a reflection of my interior condition, I was always musing referentially. I could not voice an opinion on black life beyond the latest police shooting. I could not contemplate sexual assault or sex in general beyond the latest scandal or public outcry.
Perhaps what is much worse than any of the above is that I could not dialogue internally without using the same vocabulary as my “friends.” I was speaking and thinking with the same words that they had used to describe desire, pain, and joy. Though obviously language in its nature is always somewhat referential, and I do not hope for a wholly original emotive vocabulary, as a writer I at least strive for my own unique curation of existing ideas and perceptions. The social media algorithm takes away the artist natural curative spirit and instead places before you what you think you like, what you think you know, and what you believe you believe.
4. The relationship with the body is worsened by social media. When I got an instagram, my relationship with my body changed because I was constantly recieving unwarranted commentary on how I looked. It was never negative feedback. On the contrary, the constant validation from strangers became a subconcious measure of how much I liked the way I looked on a daily basis. If an outfit didn’t photograph well, was it really stylish? Would anyone recognize that I had gained weight or lost it?
Instagram turns everyone into a model, in the sense that the way you look and how you feel about the way you look becomes the business of other people beyond passing commentary in the dressing room or the first day of high school. When I would stand naked before the mirror in my room, what was once a solitary confrontation with the self became a passage filled with thousands of comments, likes, and other bodies. And the worse part was not the infiltration into my subconscious, but the mental work I had to endure in order to make it mean nothing. That’s what addicts do; they let the addiction permeate their psyche, take on its pleasure and disregard its pain, then sweep its harmful residue under the rug of “I’ve got it all under control.”
5. Social media makes you more callous towards others. This is perhaps the most heartbreaking and flooring realization I came to in my time away from social media. The observation might have slipped by altogether had a friend (in real life) not commented on how nice I had become as of late. We had just left a class where we had been discussing the sensitive topic of the commidification of black women in pop music. A freshman white boy in the class made a sideways comment concerning black sexuality, and as the only black woman in class, I was approached by others afterward to ask my thoughts, to which I responded, “He just left high school. He doesn’t know much yet about people. Give him time and he might learn better.” My friends were obviously surprised at my pity and lack of disdain towards this boy, and waved the comment off before passing their own judgements on his character. I walked away.
Since leaving social media, I am no longer confronted with people as they exist through profiles. I can no longer piece together people’s characters through retweets and shared articles and threads. Far from Facebook, I have to instead take people at face value — instinct, perception, touch, experience, and inference. I can make assumptions, as people have always made assumptions, but I can no longer unfriend or unfollow people into oblivion. For the first time in the long time, I do not look upon people and codify them so much by identity. The boy across the classroom, who a month ago would’ve been to me more white and male and rich than anything else, instead became a naive eighteen year old — just like my younger sister now, just like me not too long ago.
These observations may seem like broad stroke generalizations painted with a wide brush over something you may claim is much more complicated and benevolent than it appears. And that may be true. But above all else, this is what I know: my parents did not grow up with social media. They survived nearly half a century before it ever reared its head, and they know what it means to be a person in the world just on the merit of your work, your character, and your interactions with other people. They know what its like to be a private citizen, without the reliqushement of your finances, whereabouts, and now personal thoughts to the mercy of a corporation who will do with it what it pleases at will, without restriction. I will never know that world. But I must seek that world, because it’s the only way I can ever know if who I am is a result of choices, experiences, and consequences I make for myself, or just the amgalmation of the beliefs of an essentially fascist data system.
“Would you like to deactivate?” Check yes. “Can you tell us why you’re leaving?” Check I just gotta find out.