A couple of months ago I had enough. Social media was driving me crazy. I have long term personal accounts that I’ve maintained for ages, archaeology project accounts, and now as my admin job for my current job I manage the Departmental social media. I probably owe a lot to social media for visibility of my research profile, but I was sick of it and needed a break. Some issues had come up in the Departmental social media and I found it overwhelming to manage these in addition to the heaps of teaching, research, and other administrative tasks that are part of my job. So I killed off my Twitter and Facebook profiles for the following reasons:
- Social media was giving me a lot of anxiety and it made me really angry. And that’s what it’s designed to do.
- It encourages passivity–it’s enough to rail against this or that, feel better, then cease any kind of drive to change at just that. So I posted an angry tweet. So what?
- It took up too much brain space. I found myself thinking in 280-character fragments. I was annoyed at what people said and annoyed at having to talk myself down from responding. I became increasingly mute on social media, though I thought a lot about it. I missed blogging, I missed reading, I missed creativity and quiet.
- I was tired of performing–performing research, performing teaching, performing activism. What’s more is I was tired of other people doing this.
- Outrage theatre is richly rewarded. Want to get lots of likes? Be angry about something, post something snarky, perform your virtue. I found it exhausting. Combined with the point above, it led to the point below.
- It made me dislike people I mostly agree with. They were too whiny or attention-seeking or posted about their pet too much. Honestly, if any of these things bothered me, it wasn’t their problem, it was me needing to get offline. So I did. We need to build allies, not engage in call-outs.
It was mostly Twitter that was the problem, I hadn’t done much with Facebook for a long time. And quitting…was amazing. Freeing. It took a couple of weeks to stop automatically punching in the urls. I enjoyed sitting in incredible lectures and not sharing them. I enjoyed not feeling like I had to converse with or impress anyone. I shut down and it was really incredible. During the CAA in Krakow I felt like I had earmuffs on, totally oblivious to backchat. Marvelous.
But I’m back, in a limited fashion. I’ve kept Facebook dead (though I realized the other day I need to check in on a few groups I maintain, uh-oh) but I re-activated Twitter. It’s annoying actually, you have to re-activate monthly anyway so you don’t lose your account. I might have just let it go, but I realized that there’s pretty much no other way to link to your blog, update people with publications, that sort of tedious stuff. But after my break, I feel like I’ve broken the back of it. I login when I have something to post, then logout again. I don’t check it, except for the Departmental accounts.
It makes me wonder, though, how I’ll teach social media for outreach. I’m already been a bit wary, wondering Is it ethical to use social media for teaching archaeology? Is bad practice in social media good practice in self-preservation?
When I worked in the Computer Science department at the University of Texas I was always surprised that Edsger Dijkstra didn’t have a computer in his office. In fact, he didn’t have one at all. One of the fathers of Computer Science, didn’t have a computer. He didn’t want actual computer to limit his imagination about what a computer might be able to do. Would that I had the brain of Dijkstra, but something is damned compelling about that.
Colleen Morgan 