These days, I frequently find myself thinking about how social media affects my daily habits and routines—and if you’re even slightly self-conscious, I expect you do the same thing. As the first generation to grow up with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and a host of other platforms, we have no real way to judge how these tools are shaping our minds and our lives in the long term. But despite all the worry about “how social media is affecting us”, I rarely hear people point about the most glaring answer: it’s making us more social.
This past week I went up to my parent’s cabin in the Muskokas for an informal writing retreat. You can read some of my tips for organizing your own writing retreat in my last post. The aim was to kickstart a side-project I’d been working on, but it was also planned to ‘take a break’ from my social media and seize a much-need opportunity for reflection. And as I sat alone, in a cabin, in the wilderness of northern Ontario, the basic impact of social media suddenly became glaringly obvious to me.
Going into the week, I decided I wanted to be as isolated as possible. The cabin was an ideal location; set down a tiny backroad in “the oldest Icelandic community in Canada” and practically off-the-grid, with limited Wifi and cell coverage. Perfect, I thought, no Facebook to distract me while I’m writing.
What I realized — four or five days into the week — is that it’s actually easier to ignore social media when you’re with other people and quite hard to do when you’re alone. For instance, I noticed that, during the three days I spent visiting a friend in Boston last weekend, I was barely tempted to check my accounts at all. This week, I don’t think I made it through the first afternoon before I started browsing Facebook during my breaks. It wasn’t that I was addicted to social media. I just wanted to be social and Facebook was the solution.
Yeah, I don’t have much discipline. But my self-control (or lack thereof) is not the point I’m trying to make. Social media makes us crave social interaction. When I was a teenager, back before I had Facebook or Twitter, I would use writing as a way to ‘recharge my batteries’. After a long day of school, I’d sit in my room and spend a few hours writing—sometimes about my day, sometimes about things completely unrelated to it. That was my escape, my way to recuperate.
Skip to the present. By day five of my retreat, I found myself in the opposite situation. I needed a retreat from writing. After setting myself the goal of approximately 5,000 words per day (which I hit, for the most part), on the fifth day I found myself staring at the computer screen, unable to physically compel myself to start typing again. I felt…well, like a sponge that’s been squeezed until it doesn’t have anything left inside it. I wanted to sit down and have a conversation with someone, read a book — anything but continue to write. And I realized that, although I still love writing, it no longer fills that role of ‘charging my batteries’ anymore. In fact, it does the reverse: I ‘re-charge’ by socializing, instead of the other way around.
Connected or separate? Source: Flickr, Ahmed Hashim – Train of thought
As a result, I find that I’m most motivated to write when I know it’s something that other people are going to read — like this blog post, for instance. And I think that social media has shaped my expectations around writing in this regard. What good is a piece of writing that just sits on your computer, taking up memory space? A piece of writing that no one ever sees? Instead, I can compose one sentence and dozens—if not hundreds—will read it online.
I must admit that I have become a bit obsessed. I began to feel this way about social media when I entered university and it’s only become more pronounced with time. The truth is that as a kid I was never particularly social. I was always looking for ways to express myself creatively, but I relied too much on structure and rules and I didn’t handle rejection well. This has always been my creative roadblock.
But what I’ve come to recognize is that social media tools—like Facebook and Instagram—have given me the confidence (over the years) to express myself in ways that I never would’ve thought of doing before. They’ve given me the confidence to ‘put myself out there’ creatively—in real life, as well as in cyberspace. And this is how I know that social media makes you more social.
I never used to be motivated to express myself in this way. The act of writing itself was enough—even if it was crude or only appealed to me, and was seen by no one but me. Social media was what first drove me to find ways to create things with broader appeal. And you can call that ‘dumbing down’ or ‘homogenizing’, but I call it ‘connecting’. And I’m still learning to do it.
Lots of people rag on social media for diluting the way that we communicate or for lowering our attention spans or for making us narcissistic and self-centred, blah blah blah. Yeah, I’m sure lots of people said similar things about television when it first appeared. But today, we’re in a golden age of television. There will always be trashy shows. It’s about choosing what you’re going to consume or, in the case of social media, choosing what you’re going to produce.
So if you’re reading this and you understand where I’m coming from, then I’d like to encourage you to post something today that isn’t a re-post or a cat meme or something else equally derivative. Post something that’s totally yours, totally creative, totally original content. This is the point of social media. Be social.
Thanks for reading! 🙂
