On post-social civilization, possible cures, and your actual self.

Increasingly I am tired of social media. Tired as in bored, and exhausted. My career however has consistently required I maintain fluency, so I've had the pleasure of watching social grow objectively more rife with all manner of issue, and society itself evolve to cater to it. Now I don't know whether we went wrong somewhere along the way, or if the premise was flawed from the start, but as any science fiction author will tell you, we don't ever understand the consequences of technology enough to mobilize it without a built-in likelihood of negative side effects, so in the end maybe it doesn't matter. Once thrilled by the mid-2006 anticipation of an imminent .edu address with its promise of a Facebook account, I now find the entire concept of social and its reigning role in (American?) society to be a bit sad, and a lot unhealthy.

As in, it breaks my heart a little when I think too long about how many people are desperate for connection, and what percentage of them are getting validation beyond the crumbs of likes offered indiscriminately or strategically by strangers behind screens. I find it unnerving the way digital validation so insidiously begins to creep into the brain as a synonym, a substitute for the awkward reality of IRL human interaction and appreciation and effort. How it raises the stakes of every post or comment or like because each one adds a detectable layer to the online definition of Who We Are. How the transparency of connections means we might stay friends with someone because the alternative lack of public tact would be unacceptable. How somehow it also invites the absolute opposite of the above: a terrible lack of tact, kindness, and mind to the fact we're still engaging with other human lives. The invitation to unhealthy voyeurism, vitriol, and so on. You know all this, you have social.

For all that, though, what I actually think is most challenging about social now is that it has become the veritable undercurrent of society, with an overarching construct that suggests that to exist means not just to insist on our Self (which is part of being human), but to express it online, and publicly—and there is simply too much of a person to distill into these modes of flattened and constricted forms of self-expression. Social asks us to conform self-expression to character counts and dimensional restrictions and timeframes, and funnels viewership through a complex recipe of opaque algorithms. It champions instant accessibility and a certain degree of thoughtlessness (in that the barrier to sharing literally anything is minimal), but then attributes significance to our content with the weight and permanence of a tattoo (I do not envy celebrities or politicians these days). It simultaneously offers the opportunity to warp or eliminate any context of an image or a clip or a caption, but also then expects us to stand by it in every context.

What that set of dichotomies creates is a rift in which we are trying to share who we are with the world, in a way we think we can control, in a way that puts our best feet forward—by distilling that systematically into platforms that don't actually care who we are but do relish and literally bank on a critical mass of us trying, and watching our peers do the same.

It has long been understood by anthropologists, artists, and scientists that viewing something changes the very nature of the thing being viewed.

What happens when that something is what we believe to be our self? When our subsequent iterations of self are informed by a skewed feedback loop?

I'm not advocating that we abandon social, nor suggesting that we are unequivocally being reduced to terrible, twisted versions of our selves.

I am suggesting we challenge how we can exist with and use social while minimizing its slow-creep toxicity. I am suggesting that perhaps we spend a bit more time on self-awareness and -evaluation so that we remember who we are in spite of and outside of these tiny, passing expressions of self.

I've been working on reducing mindless technological activity, even beyond social. Trying to imbue my digital time with a sense of purpose, and trying to remove myself from it entirely more often. I write in a journal almost every day now, a physical one, made of paper, that requires a pen, that forces me to dwell on each thought for as long as it takes me to write that thought down in cursive. It's a welcome respite from the frenetic thought processing that typing and technology encourage.

One morning a couple weeks ago I took that journal outside to my little stoop and watched the sunrise with coffee while I wrote. Just the thought of it is deliciously poetic, no? I was the happiest I'd been in ages; it felt like the sunrise was just for me, this spectacular display that no one else even knew I was watching, the magic of wondering who else in the world might be seeing it similarly, the sense that this world is so huge and was never meant to be reduced to the immediacy and hyper-accessibility of a post-social civilization.

And then, amidst all that splendor, I failed at resisting a sudden and terrible urge to go get the phone I'd intentionally left in the house, and retrieved it, and took a photo of that perfectly private sunrise, ready to broadcast it all.

I refrained from posting it, on principle. And I don't regret that (in fact I'm thankful). Perhaps I'm undermining this next thought by writing about it now, but I still carry that morning and that sunrise in a little corner of my heart and mind, tending to it and visiting it often as a very dear and private experience that only I will ever know.

There's a lot of existential angst that comes now with being able to compare yourself and what happens to you to the goings on of just about the entire human population at any given point. I certainly have developed more anxiety over the past decade, and I'm sure a good amount of it has to do with the extraordinary advent of so many life-changing technologies we've been presented with in such a short amount of time. But I'll spare you my journey through anxiety—this time—in favor of this takeaway:

I think the thing we lost sight of, as humans, is that baked into us inherently as a species is a joy of discovering the world ourselves—as we do when we are children—particularly when it feels like it is unfolding for us personally and uniquely. Social media and shared technology for as much as they can teach us and unite a planet, also have the potential to rob us of discovery and the ability to develop weirdly and imperfectly and individually as humans without an excess of both over-curated and under-considered external influences.

So what do we do with all that? How do we mitigate the insidious influence of influencers and filters and utter garbage and noise without eschewing the fun of digital connectivity? I can't tell you for sure. But I can tell you what I find personally helpful, what I imagine might help balance out the downsides, however obvious.

That is to limit who you follow. It is to use platforms selfishly and egocentrically, so that even when you post something that by virtue of being shared is intended to be seen, you refrain from engaging too much with the response. You refrain from scrolling generally through the multitudes of feeds both for the sake of having something to do and for the express purpose of comparison. Feel free to ignore people. To ignore most of what's on the platforms. Don't feel bad for that because it is unrealistic to imagine dedicating as much time to that many people in person, and just because a new platform exists does not mean that our capacity as humans to entertain has also expanded. If online contacts are not going to make an effort to also call or text or see you, you do not have to feel like you need to uphold that relationship. Try not following celebrities for a change. Post what you want, without mind to how it fits on a grid, or what it says about you, or how many likes it might get.

If the things you share that mean the most to you are generally the least liked, but you're not hurting anyone, keep posting them. This bit I know intimately well, because my instagram captions and bizarre, abstract thoughts will always be a better portrait of me than my face, but the metrics tell me most of my audience either does not know that, or does and still prefers a selfie to a soliloquy. And that's okay! Knowing that your peer's interests do not have to reflect your own, and that your online friends might not understand you or might not care for your form of self-expression therein—and being cool with that and remembering that social media really isn't real life however advanced its verisimilitude, will save you a lot of heartache.

These digital platforms will always tote themselves as The Future, but you should find the things that make you want to have a future in the first place, and spend more time and thought on that. Find the means of self-expression, other than or in addition to or instead of, social, that make you feel like a fully formed human.

If it ends up being a rambling essay written on BART that maybe doesn't even merit publishing but the act of doing just that fills you with joy and and fear and excitement, then probably it's a great idea.