Since September 2016, I’ve been taking a break from Facebook. I actually use a lot of social media for work; I’ve compared taking a personal Facebook break to working in the pizza shop, and I needed to seriously rethink my own pizza intake.
I deactivated my personal account for the last 6 months. As I’m considering what’s next, I wanted to be honest about what was a success and what I failed at, and make some commitments to hopefully help me in the future.
My main takeaway is this: a break really helped me consider things I’d taken for granted. There’s no received wisdom about the healthy balance for new technology in our lives – we each have to figure that out for ourselves.
We each have to figure out the healthy balance for new technology in our lives. Whether a long or a short break helps, it deserves some thought.
Here are the main things I found helpful to think about.
Value vs. time put in – what’s right for me?
I’m an extrovert, so I usually feel particularly comfortable, fluent, and refreshed when socializing. But instead I often felt drained by time on my personal social media. I was determined to make it work, but pouring in more time just made me feel exhausted.
Stepping back helped me sort out what was happening. Social media burnout told part of the story – I needed to better balance quality vs. quantity. I had an embarrassment of riches when it comes to interactions and entertainment. Before, I wasn’t looking at each particular activity, and whether it was fulfilling its social promise in the same way online as in real life. Sometimes it did; sometimes I had assumed it was.
What was different about messages vs. live conversations? A note sent directly to a person vs. a post to the world? Was I actually getting to know “Friends of Friends” three or four times removed?
I found I didn’t experience the kind of terrible loss I thought I might by cutting online activities for a while. I was actually fine. I made other arrangements, friends found me and I found them, or we had an every-once-in-awhile note or call instead of every day. As much as quitting induced a knee-jerk anxiety that all my friends would mourn me as if I’d died and my social life would fall apart, it wasn’t as essential as I’d let myself start to think.
When I get anxious over disconnecting for a bit in the future, it’s good to remind myself it’s no big deal. It’s actually going to be fine.
There are definitely things that I still consider valuable, even after some thought. Like the ease of finding photos and events, the fact most people’s “family newsletters” were on Facebook now, and how a thoughtful personal note to or from a friend felt good in any format. But I really needed the perspective. And I honestly needed to take a hard look at how easy it was for me to slip from something specific and valuable, into aimless internet-browsing.
It was easier to notice after I cut cable TV (years ago) and Facebook. Whenever my mind would wander, I’d have the impulse to just see what’s on, or scroll through an endless newsfeed. But it’s honestly something I’ve failed at even without those media: I would find myself opening up YouTube, rechecking the newspaper, or even reloading my email too many times for that “junkfood” media consumption, just because it was there.
Being more aware and deliberate about how I spent my free time is exactly what I wanted to get better at. And it wasn’t working.
It isn’t just a problem with Facebook, or TV, I realized, but a problem with distraction: fear of being bored is a huge challenge to overcome. Add to that fear of missing out; worry about our own image; and of course, naturally wanting to socialize or be “in the know”. These all led me to spend time on impulse I might otherwise choose to spend differently. I might rather turn my daydreams into art or go out in person – but social media is so easy. Like a credit card makes it easy to spend money frivolously, Facebook allowed me to keep spending time and wonder where it all went. It many many things very convenient – but at a cost if I wasn’t careful.
Facebook is like a credit card for time. Having it in my pocket made it very easy to spend without thinking.
I determined to at least cut down on owning too many “credit cards” or easy time-wasters. My smartphone is the biggest culprit right now. I need to actively work on mindfulness – trying to develop some basic better habits. I’ll always face the challenge not to flee from discomfort into distractions every time my mind wanders.
Still, that wasn’t the whole story.
“Best” or “best fit” communication
Reflecting on time, mindfully, was a good start. But on another level, I was also getting actively frustrated that writing more – in text, chat, comments and news feeds – actually seemed to communicate less.
Miscommunication isn’t anything new. But humans are notoriously bad at tone and other important cues with text – and we consistently think we’re much better than we are. The volume of text in our personal lives has exploded. With two thirds of all Americans online with smartphones, text and the problems that come with it are now delivered directly to us, constantly – in a flood. We assume a lot about the “best” mode for our message: that the people we have in mind will receive it in the same frame of mind as us; it’ll be read and understood about how we intended; everyone’s going to have about the same experience as we have with similar things, regardless of differences in schedule, personality, or distractions big or small.
It’s even harder as social contexts often collide and clash. Etiquette and unspoken assumptions people share in different social contexts – like work, the bar, your family room, or broadcasting on a talk show – might be jarringly mismatched and mixed together. Social media and messenger apps interrupt us everywhere. We can’t know when and where our messages will be read, or who will “overhear” them (in fact, we make assumptions about that too, which are rarely accurate). The boundaries are blurred, and keeping them becomes very difficult, if not impossible.
I’ve dealt with this sort of reality before, having worked in government, public relations, and marketing. Public figures often learn to speak and write carefully to very diverse and clashing audiences.
Perfecting this difficult PR skill – being aware of how far and wide every word might go, and using new etiquette accordingly – is now tacitly demanded of pretty much everyone.
It can be alarming that everything online is public/shareable/on permanent record by default. Our descendants could research their family tree, our high schoolers could map their town’s history with sample quotes from Facebook. How many of us have really accepted and adjusted to that reality?
Although young people growing up with social media have started learning this “public-by-default” mode, this social media space is new, and young, and quickly changing, for all of us.
Growing pains of learning and adopting this new form of communication are, plainly and simply, a reality now. Human mistakes will be made, frustrations will continue to exist as people learn and we all attempt to navigate a difficult space.
For myself, firm boundaries, a long-form blog, and defaulting to meet more in-person have been very helpful. I also allow myself to be limited in my connectivity, and take deliberate technology breaks and off time. I would rather deal with some slight inconveniences than set myself up for more burnout. Communication is hard enough as it is.
Texting and social media are here to stay. But it’s OK to set boundaries.
All of these things added up for me personally and made a break very worthwhile. I’d recommend it to anyone to get a better personal perspective on this complex and overwhelming tool that has become a daily part of our lives. But there are also bigger things going on.
This didn’t happen in a vacuum.
Let’s talk about the elephant in the room:
The election
The truth is, globally, we’re all right at the very beginning of figuring out privacy expectations, ethics, how we treat each other – even the truth with the new reality of the internet, smartphones and social media. People’s ideas about how these should fit into their own lives vary wildly, and don’t always mix in happy ways. Societies have always had phases of figuring out how to behave with new communication or technology. We’re now in a new frontier of forming social norms and rules with a billion people in shared virtual space.
Which brings us to the 2016 US election. Or a lot of politics around the world in the digital age.
The 2016 US election and aftermath have drastically changed the discussion. This happened in the background of my own frustrations, but surely contributed to them. What was once a personal question – “Am I spending a little too much time in distraction, or miscommunication? Is this a healthy balance?” – has become a society-wide reckoningwith effects on democracy, psychology, civil debate, group behavior and more.
What was once a personal question – “Am I spending a little too much time in distraction, or miscommunication? Is this a healthy balance?” – has become a society-wide reckoning.
A great good that’s come from this is the honest conversation around activism and change with the reality of social media. Over the past 6 months I’ve had more (in-person) conversations with more serious, actionable ideas about community organizing and social media than I’ve had in the past 6 years. We’ve made a lot of assumptions about how the internet will change society and democracy, and this year has acted as a wake-up call that it’s not necessarily going how we thought – we need to take a more deliberate, proactive role to affect positive change.
Though maybe I shouldn’t be, I’ve been perplexed by the way people’s behavior changes online. I can’t seem to shrug off the common assumption that online abuse is the “norm”. The more I hear “that’s just the way it is” the more I question that’s the way it has to be. And seeing a public figure shrug and engage in bullying, mob mentality, willful miscommunication – it’s disappointing. Indulging our worst impulses won’t help us lead better lives. These are all forces we’re going to need to examine thoughtfully and maturely in our own lives, and let’s face it, in our country and our globalized culture. I’m not saying I’m perfect at this. But I want to try and do better.
At the most basic level, shouldn’t we take a moment to deeply consider what might happen in an uncontrolled social experiment with 7.5 million kids?
For me, it’s still personal. I think people have the right to set their own boundaries. Decisions like when to have privacy, who to associate with, and how to spend our time are deeply personal ones. But now, as concerns about weakening civic dialogue have come to light, it’s personal on a new level.
It’s not that social media – or any new form of communication – is a societal evil in itself. That’s the wrong message. Ultimately, I’ll try to find a place for social media in my life within limits, as I try to use what I’ve learned to live in a more mindful way. But we do need to talk about how new incentives, new products and new behaviors fit into our lives. We need to deeply consider how it’s affecting us, not just the extreme cases but the everyday of how we’re being treated and treating others, how we’re thinking about our time and relationships, and if what’s really happening matches the picture in our heads of what we think is happening.
Ultimately, I’ll try to find a place for social media in my life within limits, as I try to use what I’ve learned to live in a more mindful way.
We need to be free to reflect, to change, to question what we’re doing just because everyone else is doing it, to try to make our lives better – and if need be, to walk back a path we’ve taken, whether or not we choose to return that way again.
