Leaving social media and social media leaving me.
Like many people, I’ve often thought about leaving social media. I never thought about the possibility that social media might leave me.
The first big social network for me, like many people, was Facebook. I was a relatively early adopter, through a friend studying a PhD who’d got on board when it was only for college students. Early adopter is a faintly redundant term anyway, as within weeks almost everyone I knew was on it and office productivity in my very dull job dropped about 50% as people spent their time poking each other and trying to think of witty status updates.
Facebook was the first social network I left too. There were others that had fallen by the wayside, but Facebook I actively chose to leave. I left in June 2020, in the midst of a global pandemic when everyone was trapped at home. It may seem like a strange moment to cut one of your lines of communication with the world, but when it’s time, it’s time. I had come to realise that I was spending large chunks of my day scrolling through it with almost no pleasure, mainly seeing adverts and posts from brands and organisations rather than my friends. When I did see stuff from my friends, I got increasingly annoyed by their terrible opinions, and no doubt they were equally annoyed by mine. It was supposed to be fun, but it wasn’t any more, so I packed my bags and went. By which I mean, downloaded my data, got phone numbers or emails for those people I actually still wanted to stay in touch with, and closed my account.
Twitter was different though, because I actually enjoyed it. I loved the way that I could find out news there before anywhere else, and read different perspectives that I would not find in newspapers or major websites (the newspaper I read seems to get most of its’ stories from Twitter anyway). I also loved the jokes and memes that would sweep across the site, mocking the ridiculous tweets and even more ridiculous events of the day.
As a music writer, it was a place to share my work, and it was always satisfying to know that if I wrote about a band there was a reasonable chance they would read it. They might even like it, sometimes no doubt just clicking like out of politeness, but sometimes with genuine enthusiasm (it turns our artists appreciate it when people sincerely enjoy their work, who knew?) I appreciated the little connections I made with musicians and promoters, other music writers and music fans, and for those musicians who clearly maintained their own social media presence, it felt like you gained a little insight into their lives, their personalities, their struggles.
There were downsides to Twitter too of course. It was always important to remember that, just because you know someone on social media, doesn’t mean you actually know them, or that you’re their friend. I remember being genuinely worried about the mental health of a musician I followed on Twitter, because of the contents of some of their tweets. I reached out by DM to see if I could help, as I would have contacted a real life friend but it did not help. I soon realised that if I was in that situation some random bloke contacting me on Twitter would be the last thing I needed. Twitter friends had the tendency to suddenly disappear too, which is rare amongst real life friends. I still worry about one person I followed due to a shared love of the band Broadcast. They went from being a prolific tweeter to completely disappearing overnight, and I have no way of knowing what happened to them.
It’s also true to say that, as a middle-aged straight, cis, white guy, with not all that many followers, I didn’t experience the worst of Twitter. The abuse, the pile-ons, the unwanted sexual advances that are the lot of many Twitter users (mainly women of course) were luckily not a problem for me. Whilst there was a lot of awful content and terrible people on Twitter, it was easy enough to for me to avoid it and them, by following a few simple rules (don’t read the replies, don’t read the trending topics, block as many people as you like). My Twitter experience was mainly a happy one. I did spend a lot of time there, and occasionally pondered spending my time on more productive things, but I never seriously thought I would leave.
Until that is, one of the aforementioned terrible people bought the place, and the possibility of Twitter’s decline and/or failure became very real. Until then, despite occasionally considering leaving social media, I never considered that social media might leave me. It had never happened to me before. Any previous social networks, I had been the one to leave. MySpace was the only one that kind of made the decision for me, by going into an irreversible decline. I had never been on it that much anyway, it being from the era before I had a smartphone, or even a laptop. I wasn’t even on the internet all that much then, hard though it is for me to believe now.
I never thought Twitter would be gone though, and to be fair it probably won’t be, not completely. It’s more likely that gradually more and more people will leave and it will be denuded of interesting people and worthwhile content. It will remain in some form though, a ghost, a shell (even MySpace is still technically there), it will just stop being a place I want to spend time.
Even if Twitter stops, or I stop using it, I doubt I will be completely gone from social media. I will find another social network. Perhaps an existing one, although not Instagram (I’m a words more than pictures person) or TikTok (I’m always listening to music so have no desire for videos where I have to have the sound on, or Facebook (already left it). Maybe Mastodon or Hive? Or maybe something new that I’m not even aware of yet. I’ve got to have somewhere else to share my writing I suppose, even though it’s mainly done for my own pleasure at this stage, not because I particularly expect anyone to actually read it.
Whichever networks or communities I find though, I’m not sure I’ll enjoy them as much as Twitter. I’ll miss it being my go to place to find out what people are saying about the events of the day, I’ll miss covfefe and 30–50 feral hogs and the plums in the icebox. Most of all I’ll miss my Twitter peeps. In a shock twist it turns out the real Twitter actually was the friends we made along the way.
Originally published at http://colourthecortex.wordpress.com on November 21, 2022.
