So, it’s come to my attention that I’m something of an “internet hermit.” (thanks J.R.) Which is actually unintentional. I quit Facebook in 2014 and Twitter back in 2016, and while I’m still active on Goodreads, I mostly just use it to post book reviews and keep track of my TBR pile. After I moved back to Utah, the blog went mostly dark, which combined with everything else means that my online presence has practically gone to nothing.
I quit social media for a variety of reasons, mostly having to do with privacy concerns. In the last couple of years, though, my reasons have changed. There’s a fascinating talk on YouTube by Chamath Palihapatiya, one of the founders of Facebook, where he speaks about the negative long-term effects of social media on individuals and societies. His observations are sobering. If you have the time, it’s worth it to watch his talk in detail, but this video does an excellent job of discussing the relevant points:
So with all that said, why am I experimenting with social media again?
Because it’s come to my attention that the people who are looking for me don’t really have a way to find me, and that’s a problem. There’s this blog, of course, but this isn’t the 00’s anymore, unfortunately; people don’t typically go searching for blogs anymore. They search Facebook, or Twitter, or Instagram, or Одноклассники, or whatever social media they happen to use the most. For better or worse, if you don’t have a presence on these platforms, you’re effectively invisible to a whole lot of people.
When I quit social media, I was more concerned about my personal usage of these platforms than my own visibility. Not a lot of people were looking for me back then. There might not be a lot of people looking for me now, either, but I do want to set things up so that as my readership expands and my writing career grows, people have a way to find me.
So here’s what I plan to do: set up social media accounts, link them to my blog feed, and post content primarily through my blog. If people want to interact with me on social media, I’ll log in and interact with them, but my primary home on the internet is going to be this blog.
We’ll see how it turns out. In case you’re interested, I have a Facebook page here and a Twitter account here. If there’s any other social media you think I should have a presence on, please let me know.
A few years ago, I deleted my Facebook account. There were many reasons for this, which I detailed at the time. Basically, I had major issues with their privacy policy and completely lost trust with the company. I got out because I no longer wanted to be their product.
Unfortunately, the network effect that makes social media sites so much “better” as their user base grows also makes it that much harder to stay away from them once they get huge. I got a new Facebook account back in 2015 to stay in touch with a local group of friends who planned all their social events that way, and dabbled with the idea of coming back. In the end, I decided not to and deleted that account when it was no longer useful, right before the elections really started to heat up. Perfect timing.
Last week, I bit the bullet and went back onto Facebook, because again there’s a local group of friends who plan everything exclusively on Facebook, and I found myself missing out on things because I was out of the loop. This time, though, I’m friending absolutely no one and keeping my usage of the site to a minimum. If I were moving back to Utah tomorrow, I’d delete my account before I packed my stuff.
I’ve noticed some interesting things since getting back on Facebook.
First, the site is a mess. It’s like a weird cross between Goodreads and MySpace. I know there’s a lot of people who love Goodreads, but sorry, that site is almost impossible to navigate. Way too much clutter, with the option you’re looking for hidden in some tiny link that doesn’t actually look like a link. Unless you’re a frequent user, you constantly feel like you’re lost. That’s Facebook now. It’s very unfriendly for new users, which I know is like me and ten people living in Yurts in Mongolia, but still. In terms of user-friendliness, it’s going the way of MySpace.
Second, Facebook has become really slutty. Again, first impressions here. It’s really interesting when Facebook has nothing to base their algos off of. I assume from what I’m seeing that the recommendations default to its power users, which at a cursory glance are mostly chicks and dude bros. Also, some of the group recommendations I’m seeing are insanely over the top in terms of sheer raunchiness. Since when did Facebook turn into Potterville?
Third… why are there multiracial emojis now?
Diversity is not a virtue in and of itself. It has to be paired with common values. Diversity without any common values is a state of war.
But Joe, what’s the harm in an emoji that reflects your skin tone? Two things. First, social media divides us far more than it unites us. It walls us off into tribes, helping us build our own custom echo chambers full of people who only agree with us. It’s an incubator for much of the divisiveness in society right now. Second, there is a very real effort in the country today to divide us all by race.
In society at large, we have very little in common anymore. If we can’t even agree on facts, how can we agree on values? A nation without common values is only a major crisis away from a civil war.
So call me paranoid, but these multiracial emojis are, in my humble opinion, a sign of a very disturbing trend. Either Facebook is simply giving the market what it wants, in which case society is much closer to the edge of the cliff than I’d realized, or Facebook has an agenda. Best case scenario, Facebook is simply responding to a small but vocal minority of their power users, and the rest of us don’t care. Not great, but not the end of the world (yet).
Fourth, and perhaps most disturbingly, people seem to be so plugged into Facebook that when they meet in real life, the conversation often defaults to whatever someone posted that they all saw. This is especially true of people ten years younger than me. I know it’s anecdotal, so I shouldn’t extrapolate it into a general trend. What I can say is that after moving to a new place and making a new group of friends, I’m seeing this a lot more than I used to.
The thing that makes this disturbing is that the people who do this tend to be a lot less open or curious about those outside their immediate social group. They also tend to crave validation so much that they go along to get along. When every social media interaction is subject to a gladatorial-style thumbs up vote from everyone you know, is it any wonder that no one wants to step out into the arena unless they know that someone has their back?
In short, Facebook is becoming more toxic. What’s the antidote? Probably to read more books. That’s what Jeff VanderMeer suggests in his book BookLife, and I tend to agree. One of the best ways to unplug from the Internet is to curl up with a good book.
It has been more than a week since I’ve posted here, which is a bit surprising. Then again, I did decide to take a short break from writing, which pushed blogging a little further down the priority tree. The much higher priority has been finishing my friend’s basement before his wife has a baby next week (they’re inducing labor on the 14th). Twelve-hour workday sure are brutal.
In any event, I’ve been reflecting a lot on the craziness of politics these days, and the role of social media in that craziness. Without getting too deep into Trump vs. Clinton vs. Bernie, it seems sometimes that the supporters for each candidate are living in entirely different worlds.
Perhaps that’s because they are.
According to Pew Research, three out of five Americans get their news from social networking sites, with one out of five getting their news from social media often. For Reddit, Facebook, and Twitter, the majority of users get their news from the site.
Do Twitter and Facebook have a right to be politically partisan? Yes. They are private businesses, and as such should be allowed to participate in politics just like any other business (of course there are issues when they lie about being politically agnostic, but that’s a different issue).
The problem is that people have come to rely on social media so much that it completely warps the reality that they live in.
Every online community is, to a greater or lesser extent, an echo chamber that amplifies the viewpoints that the members tend to agree on and suppresses the viewpoints where most of the members disagree. This is why we have Godwin’s Law: because intellectual laziness is easy when everyone thinks you’re right. As online communities grow, the culture becomes even more self-sorting, developing complex narratives to reaffirm and reinforce the rightness of the group.
Essentially, humans are tribal, and the trend is for online communities to be more tribal, not less. Social media accelerates this trend by enabling users to fine-tune their tribes, blocking out any uncomfortable or dissenting viewpoints and creating a “safe space” where the user’s core beliefs are continually reinforced.
When people spend more time with their carefully curated online tribes than they do with people in the real world, the online reality becomes their reality. Instead of facing uncomfortable truths about the way the world actually works, they craft their own worlds where they don’t have to be responsible for their own actions, and their beliefs are always correct, even when they’re based on a failed ideology.
(As a side note, this is why gaslighting is such a big thing nowadays: it’s the art of crafting someone else’s online reality, without them realizing what’s happening. It’s a tactic that we see very often in today’s online politic debates.)
So what happens when one of these social media junkies comes out of their online echo chambers?
Whatever your position on LGBTQ issues, you have to admit that Steven Crowder absolutely destroyed Zack Ford in that debate. It wasn’t even close. The Twitter warrior was woefully unprepared to answer even the most basic criticisms of his underlying assumptions, and seemed frankly shocked that those assumptions were under debate.
This is what happens when you live in a virtual world. When you can simply block or unfollow any viewpoint that’s inconvenient to your preferred narrative, then the narrative becomes your only truth, no matter how false it actually is.
In its extreme form, it’s just as scary as the worst propaganda of the 20th century. In fact, it’s even more scary, because we’re doing it to ourselves.
I feel like I’ve got a unique perspective on this issue because, for most of the last year, I’ve been living without social media. I deleted my Facebook back in 2014, and disengaged from Twitter back in March.
(Since then, I have gone back to Facebook in a limited way, only because there’s a particular church group where the only way to keep up with events is to be part of the Facebook group. But I’ve only friended family and close friends and liked only a couple of political pages, and even then, I’ve felt the pull. When I’m no longer a part of this church group, I will delete my Facebook again and leave the site for good.)
Life is a lot different without social media. It’s a lot less stressful, a lot more satisfying. I get out more. I have deeper and more meaningful conversations with my friends. I no longer feel like I’m perpetually caught up in imbecilic arguments with twats and idiots. I feel a lot more free to pursue constructive things, like my writing.
At the same time, it really does feel sometimes that I went to sleep ten years ago and woke up in a different world. It’s like everyone else is crazy, and I’m the only sane one (until I discovered Ben Shapiro). I’m not sure how much of that has to do with leaving social media, since I only did that recently. Perhaps it was only by leaving social media that I realized how much everything outside of that echo chamber had changed.
I’m actually a lot happier without social media than I was with it. At the same time, I feel a lot less connected with what’s going on in my country right now. But is that only an illusion? Is it kind of like how you always feel like your writing sucks just as it starts to get better?
Whatever the case, I do know that if I were more active on social media, I would definitely be the guy that offends everyone with my political views, including a lot of potential readers. I suppose I could roll with it like Larry Correia, but I’m not quite passionate enough about politics to make that my shtick.
Though with the way things are shaping up politically, I may do a fisking or two on my blog. On that note, I’ll leave you with Ben Shapiro bringing some sanity to the news cycle:
Two weeks ago, I decided that I was done with Twitter. This came after a long series of controversies, starting with gay conservative pundit Milo Yiannopoulos’s de-verification and culminating with Twitter’s Trust and Safety Council. For those of you unfamiliar with all of this Twitter-related internet drama, Sargon of Akkad does an excellent job explaining it:
I was originally going to blog about this a couple of weeks ago, but then Larry Correia came out and said that he had made the exact same decision, for much the same reasons I had. That surprised me, though, because Larry was one of the more active Twitter users I followed, with an impressively large following. To give that all up… wow.
Larry wrote:
You’ve probably heard about how Twitter is falling apart. Their stock price has been tanking.
Recently they created a Trust and Safety Council, to protect people from being triggered with hurtful dissenting ideas. Of course the council is made up of people like Anita Sarkesian, so you know how it is going to swing.
They’ve been unverifying conservatives, and outright banning conservative journalists. Then there were rumors of “shadow banning” where people would post, but their followers wouldn’t see it in their timelines. So it’s like you’re talking to a room that you think has 9,000 people in it, but when the lights come on you’ve been wasting time talking to an empty room.
In the last couple of months before I signed off, I saw this happening myself—not so much the shadow-banning, which is invisible by nature, but the fact that certain hashtags (like #GamerGate) fail to auto-complete. I also saw it in a double-standard applied to conservative Twitter users like Adam Baldwin, who had his account locked for tweeting that anti-GG people are unattractive, while around the same time a certain liberal journalist compared Ted Cruz to Hitler and received no disciplinary action whatsoever. Lots of little stuff like this, which over time builds up.
All of this probably sounds like a tempest in a teapot if you aren’t on Twitter. And yeah, it kind of is. In the last two weeks, I’ve learned that life is generally better without Twitter than it is with it. No more getting sucked into vapid tit-for-tat arguments in 140-character chunks. No more passive-aggressive blocking by people who are allergic to rational, intelligent debate. No more having to worry about being an obvious target for perpetually-offended SJW types who, in their constant efforts to outdo each other with their SJW virtue signaling, can spark an internet lynch mob faster than a California wildfire.
The one big thing that I miss about Twitter is the rapid way that news disseminates through the network. I can’t tell you how many major news stories I heard about through Twitter first—often while they were still unfolding. But if the #RIPTwitter controversy demonstrates anything, it’s that Twitter now has both the means and the motive to suppress major news stories that contradict their preferred political narrative. That puts them somewhere around Pravda as a source for news and information.
Am I going to delete my account the same way that I deleted my Facebook account? Probably not. I deleted my Facebook account because of privacy concerns and Facebook’s data mining. With Twitter, it’s more of an issue with the platform itself. I don’t need to delete my account to sign off and stop using it.
No more Facebook, no more Twitter… does this mean I’m no longer on any social media at all? Practically speaking, yes. For someone who makes their living on the internet, that may not be the smartest decision, but I do still have this blog, where I know I will never be un-verified or shadow-banned.
Blogging may seem like an old-fashioned relic of the late oughts or early teens, but I’ve always enjoyed it and have been doing it consistently (more or less) for the past ten years. That’s more than I can say for any social media site. For those of you who are active on social media, I do intend to keep the share links active on my blog posts and pages. However, the best place to find me online still is and always has been this blog.
