Can we finally, as a society, collectively admit that social media is no longer a force for good in the world?
I’d also say it’s debatable if it was ever a force for good in the first place, but that’s a different topic.
Social media in 2020 is the world’s largest soapbox for once-fringe morons to very effectively spread fascist and hateful agendas using disinformation and a time-tested technique of hacking the human brain’s propensity to over-engage with and widely share any content that sparks outrage.
This has turned vast swathes of generally decent (if somewhat ignorant) people into vectors of ideological disease.
And if the pandemic has taught us anything, you can counter the spread of disease with social (media) isolation.
This is part of the reason why I deleted my Facebook account, stopped using Reddit, severely limited my activity on the last 2 stragglers in my social media portfolio — Instagram and LinkedIn — and most notably, deleted all of my tweets save for my prescient-yet-obvious first contribution to Twitter back in the innocent and halcyon days of 2008:
Twitter = Orwell’s ‘1984’ by choice rather than force
— Chaosverse (@chaosverse). May 19, 2008
This has had a substantially positive impact on my mental health and sanity, while my reasons for renunciation are reinforced whenever I do end up briefly visiting social platforms for work.
As someone in content and marketing, I have to visit Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn as part of my job. Whenever I do, I try and ensure that I make a quick ingress, finish the mission asap and leave immediately.
But, like a fly in a spiderweb, I sometimes find myself ensnared by the platform. On these occasions, I end up reading a few posts (and occasionally comments, ugh!) or catching a glimpse of the day’s top trending content and hashtags.
And that never fails to absolutely ruin my mood.
I would really like it if I went the rest of my (hopefully long) life without ever laying my eyes on the problematic, programmatic, pabulum prose of Twitter or any social media site (but especially Twitter) ever again. I would love it if 2020 was the last year I was ever on social media at all. But that’s not an option anymore.
A social media presence has gone from the alternative to the mainstream to being sort of, compulsory. There’s a widespread idea that you cannot achieve any kind of engagement with a wider audience without farming attention on social media. That is not just repugnant, it’s frightening.
I would rather not turn myself into some Kim Kardashian or Donald Trump clone to further my ideas, but it feels like most of us are being incentivized to do exactly that.
Personally, I hope we can normalize (and dare I say, encourage?) not having a social media presence. Even for writers and content marketing professionals. Call it a social media absence.
But we’re not there yet. And that means, for now at least, I need to slowly re-emerge from the sanity of my sans social safe space and re-enter the fray.
So, like-share-subscribe?
Harish Alagappa 
Leave a comment