For the last six months, I have not been active on Social Media. For me, that means Facebook, in particular. Friends there may not have noticed, which is to be expected among all of the noise on it, and not on it right at the moment. The biggest primer for me to go off was the start of our homeschooling our girls. I did not want my habits on Social Media to interfere with my being involved in one of the most important things I could apply myself to! But there have been other reasons for going off as well.
Ironically, I had felt that Facebook had become a bit of an Anti-Social Media platform. That was not just because of all the ads and interactions on Facebook, but due to external circumstances as well. Politics in particular have been extremely divisive in this country lately. In that sphere, Facebook has become like a giant comments section, best to be avoided.
There is another side of what I have found wrong with Facebook as well. Going all the way back to Middle School, I remember a teacher once saying that if we were able to hear the thoughts of all the people around us all the time, we would not want to be around all those people, because of what they are thinking. We’d find them very disagreeable. Now, as an adult, we have a platform where people put their thoughts without inhibition, and what do we find? Division and disagreement. Yet, we once walked among each other without such, and with the same thoughts simmering within ourselves. Hence, Social Media has become Anti-Social.
I suppose that my step back from Social Media is a bit in protest against it. In a sense, it is thought tribalism to me. We are getting into tribes of agreement. But we have not yet learned as a species to still get along when we don’t agree. The worst offenders are the ones who try to barb others just to see them get upset. The best among us can still accept others, despite holding different opinions.
I think what has bothered me the most about the situation is finding myself turning away from other people for just such reasons as disagreement. That action is the very undermining of Democracy. We are seeing it in smaller scale in the United States Congress, and now we are joining in in the general public.
There is yet another aspect to my self ban from Social Media. I knew a girl in college, a sister of a friend, who once said to be in her usual brash way, “Kelsey, you are only good for the one-liner.” It was her way of telling me that I didn’t think deeply. It was a shallow and arrogant assessment from someone who never took the time to look into me and get to know me on a deep level. Yet, brevity is often the course of Facebook. We type up our thoughts, try to keep them interesting and to the point, but in doing so, we are not showing who we are any more than a label on a package can give us the experience of Belgian Chocolate. We have busy lives, and we obviously want for interaction, or else, why would we be on Facebook? But our interactions are shallow, and miss the point of our humanity. I am glad I was good for a one-liner. It is nice to be thought of as one who can summarize concisely. But single lines don’t appear as if by magic! There is a lot in each of us, and we are worth knowing more deeply. I want to know people more deeply. I often have found myself failing abysmally trying to do that in a Social Media sphere.
Finally, there is another reason I am off. Many years ago I found myself in possession of a book of lost crafts. It spoke of things like bobbin lace, coppicing and coopering, building stone walls, and stone masonry. Soon we found ourselves doing our best to live lives that reacquired some of those skills, and chief among them, doing things for ourselves rather than relying on a store to provide everything we need in our day to day lives. I am old fashioned that way. Given the choice, I would rather have a quality tool that I will give to my children, and use it to make an heirloom piece, than buy something from a shop and satisfy a need. In the end, I would rather make paper and ink and a quill to write with, than spit out snippets on an electronic device. This path of discovery has also lead me to understand practicality. I know I cannot make an electric toaster, for example, or that even though we mix our own laundry detergent, we have to buy the ingredients we mix, rather than source them from nature ourselves. So, with Social Media, it is a distraction from the sleeves up, dirty hand life I am involved in.
This brings us to my final main reason for going off Facebook. Maybe my reasons are easy to understand, maybe they are not. Maybe they are agreeable, and maybe not. Whether or not my reasons are doesn’t matter, because of this final reason, and that is, my reasons are my own. When I was pouring through Facebook it was easiest to let other people think for me, to agree, or to “Like.” Once that was done, the thinking was done too. Oh sure, I would think about how I agree with a perspective. But I did not think much about the counter perspective. I was losing empathy, and I was losing possession of my own thoughts all at once. Off Facebook, I do what I do, and think what I think, and nobody “Likes” my doing so. I just do it. I just be. Just being is something that has evolved into us for a long time. It is something we are good at. It is something I can do, and it doesn’t take a lot of extra time reading interesting, but time consuming information or, in some cases, disinformation. I have not got all the extra voices in my head, but instead, my own, which does a fair job of navigating through hate and racism and sexism and nationalism, and so on, and always has done.
So those are some of the reasons I have been off Facebook for some time. I may be off for a while to come, as well. It is nothing that anyone has done, and it is not because of my health, or anything like that. It is just a situation that developed, beyond anyone’s control, and one that I can avoid with the reward of renewed focus on my short life. I miss so many of the people I know through the platform, and trust that those who I have known for many years can be contacted through it in the future. I can always be reached by Private Message on Facebook, or by e-mail. A Private Message is a good way to get my e-mail address if you need it.
Kelsey J Bacon
Fairview, Idaho