-Walker Percy, The Moviegoer
"In my childhood, you’d gather around the grandparents and they would tell the family stories … Now individuals sit around the TV, watching other families’ stories. (...) Once, families at least gathered around the television. Now each person has their own screen.”
"It is a sad but unavoidable fact of life," he began, "that as we age our social circles grow smaller. Whether from increased habit or diminished vigor, we suddenly find ourselves in the company of just a few familiar faces."
-Amor Towles, A Gentleman In Moscow
It's become a bit of a cliche to say you're rethinking your social media habits in the year 2021. Lots of people have left Facebook and/or Instagram because of the shockingly bad "privacy" policies, the addictive nature of the apps, the increasingly hostile environment, and many other reasons. But I'm not very hipster-minded and I don't mind being one more person in the crowd of people rethinking it. In fact, I've toyed with the idea of deleting my Facebook account basically since I got it, and it took me much longer than most of my friends to jump on board the Instagram train because of my dislike for Facebook.
By now, I think most of us are worn out from the stress of 2020 which has been amplified, not assuaged, by the constant barrage of noisy opinions on the internet, and so most of us are wondering if it's even still worth it to log in. But while I have many friends who have left social media, or gone to new social media websites, the majority remains. And in the new age of social distancing, isn't it nice to maintain relationships however you can?
But my problem with social media is not primarily the lack of privacy. Rather, it's the damage I see it doing to relationships, despite the claim of building them. Throughout the ups and downs of 2020, my opinions of so many people I primarily interact with through social media have been dragged down. I unfollowed person after person, ultimately deciding that seeing their posts was only encouraging me to break the 8th commandment and that it would be better for our relationship if I only interacted with them face to face. While I know this is partially due to my own very low levels of patience and my human tendency to think I am always in the right, many times it was also a surprising blow, coming from a person I expected better of, posting things that seem quite blatantly at odds with the Lutheran worldview we both share.
I'm not here to say that my way of viewing the world is the right one. I have been wrong so many times before that those times probably outweigh the times I have been right. I am not here to say that you need to agree with my political opinions, or my opinions on the pandemic, or my opinions on anything else. Opinions are opinions. But while plenty claim that Facebook is the one place where you can still interact and discuss with people who look at things differently than you, I think we all know that that's not actually true. What happens instead is people posting inflammatory statements, alienating friends who might view things differently, and leaving no room for real discussion. People say things on social media that they would never (I hope) say to someone face to face. If anyone questions the almighty poster, they rarely get anything more than a cutting gibe, a put down, or a defensive restating of their original statement. There is so little listening on social media, because the very nature of it begs for speed. Read a sentence or two, instantly respond with a reaction emoji, maybe add a comment for good measure, and scroll on. Your entire interaction with the thought put forth lasts less than a minute. This is hardly enough time to listen or consider what someone else is trying to say.
What, ultimately, is the difference between posting something to a crowd on the internet and having no one to talk to, no one who really listens?
Not only does social media require no real effort, it does further harm to relationships by pretending to maintain them. If you are friends with someone on Facebook, or follow them on Instagram, you can give yourself the illusion that you are truly friends with them, even if you never put in any effort beyond liking their posts and occasionally commenting. "I'm still friends with so-and-so!" we tell ourselves, "I know all about what's going on in her life. She just went on a big trip! She just got engaged! She just got a new job! She just had a baby." But if you only know about their life through their posts on the internet, then you are no more friends with them than any random stranger who happens to follow them as well. Friendship requires real effort, like all relationships. To be honest, it requires so much effort that I don't know if I, or most of us, would even be able to do it without social media. But when I read books or hear from older generations about friendships before the internet, it is like a man dying of thirst reading about an ice cold glass of water. People hanging out on their porches, stopping by their neighbors to visit in the evenings, generations passing down their stories to each other, writing pages and pages of letters to keep up with faraway friends, working side by side and celebrating side by side. It's not that none of this exists now, but I don't see much of it in my generation, or in my own life.
I enjoy doing my 365 photo projects, and Instagram is a great place to share those photos. If I simply took the photos and never shared them with anyone, I don't think I would keep up with it. Art should be shared, even if it's just with the 30 or so people who consistently see them (if that's you, please know that you are the reason I still post). I am not trying to argue here that we should stop liking and commenting, that there is no use for social media at all, or that if you have ever kept up with me on social media then I automatically view you as taking the easy way out. I'm not planning to leave Instagram, and for now, at least, I'm staying on Facebook, if only for a few groups that I am in where I have found people who actually do listen and discuss and form a sort of community. I've never had many friends, I've never been a great friend, and at this point in life, "in the trenches of motherhood" as some like to say, I have fewer than ever. Part of this is probably the inevitable result of growing older and having so much of my attention already taken up by my household that not much is left over. But the modern world is a lonely one, and having little energy doesn't mean that you're immune to the loneliness. Perhaps part of the problem is looking to social media to alleviate it, when what is really needed is work and effort. And logging off.
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