Quitting social media

I don't think I'm going back to Twitter, although I will say I've missed quite a few stories that I otherwise would have seen. It does make you feel less connected, not being on social media. But then I ask myself the value of the news that I'm missing. None of it is life changing.

 

I'm still there, partly because I need to monitor my company's feed. But it's become more and more of a news aggregation than anything for me. Lots of link clicking. My actual tweeting/interaction is way down.

 

I'm finding a lot of people seem to be tweeting and interacting less. I rarely go on myself, but when I do, there are a few accounts I regularly check, and the new posts are getting much more infrequent.

 

No one can get a word in edgewise anymore.

Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) | Twitter

 

Set out two or three books for the holiday season, read them and ask yourself in a month if you missed Twitter.
Or a pile of movies. Or a home project.
Any will suffice.

 

Do fuckbooks count?

 

I shut mine off this past weekend. It was about the signal to noise ratio of my time online. I work online, have a small handmade business, and use the internet to get freelance work. Social media has been a necessary evil for all of that. This month is about looking for a better way to conduct business.

Along with losing Facebook and Twitter for a month, I subscribed to NYT and The New Yorker. It's been frustrating to click on what looks like an interesting story only to find a three to five hundred word stub. Investing time and money in good writing feeds my head and heart and supports journalists who are lucky enough to work for sites that actually care about what they publish. I wish there was a local paper I could subscribe to with that mindset. Finding an article in The Tennessean that weighs in at more than three hundred words is a challenge, and The Commercial Appeal is a ghost of its former glorious self.

 

Jonah Keri said on his podcast this week that he'd quit Twitter. "It was becoming annoying. It was preventing me from doing the things I wanted to do in my life."

The movement grows! WELCOME TO THE RESISTANCE!

 

Yeah, I'm not deleting my account, just in case, but I ain't going back. It's shit. I feel so much better for not being on it.

 

I won't be getting rid of my work account (only follow about 40 folks, all work related), but my read-only account, which I use to follow news, comedians and a lot of other nonsense, is now regularly on the brink of being deleted — or at least whittled down to benign accounts like Earth Pics.

 

Meh. 99% of Wright Thompson mentions are positive or at worst, neutral.