Contra Social Media
November 11, 2022

If you were to look for my name on social media, you'd find a me-sized hole. I 
don't use it. At all. No Facebook, no Twitter. No Instagram or LinkedIn or 
TikTok or Mastodon or anything else. And my life is better for it. The churn 
and chaos that's happened over Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter has passed me 
right by. The fact that Meta seems to be dying doesn't concern me a bit. I've 
never had my information exposed in one of their seemingly endless data 
breaches. A friend once remarked I didn't seem as stressed out as other people 
he knew; when I told him I didn't use social media, he replied "That must be it."

The reasons for me not being on social media are partially practical: I was 
overseas and had a crappy internet connection when social media became popular; 
the place where I worked recommended we *not* use it, since it allowed various 
bad actors (criminals, terrorists) to figure out where (and when) we were at 
any one time. And some of the reasons are philosophical and personal: it quickly 
became apparent that social media was a time suck and that envy and anger seemed 
to be its driving emotions.  Besides, by the time I got back from overseas, much 
of the wave of excitement around social media was past and the downsides were 
already becoming apparent. So I never signed up.

"How do you keep current on what's going on in the world?" someone might ask. 
Easy. I get my news and information from the radio, from a subscription to the 
*Economist,* or from RSS feeds. I like RSS because it lets me control which, 
when, and how much information I see. You'd be surprised how many websites still 
have feeds--or don't realize there's a back-end application chugging away to 
create a feed for them (such as many of the sites made with Wordpress). Whenever 
I find a website I like, I try appending "rss.xml" or "atom.xml" or "/feed" or 
"/rss" or doing a quick online search to see what pops up. If I find a feed, I 
add it to my reader.

I don't even use social media as part of my writing life. I feel the benefits 
of a writer's social media presence have been overstated and the downsides 
understated. Quite a few authors I know say that having a Facebook page or 
Twitter feed hasn't really increased their number of sales (despite their 
agent/editor/publisher telling them they *had* to have one for marketing and 
promotion/fan outreach purposes). Several have mentioned the imbalance between 
amount of the work they put into keeping their feeds updated and the results 
they get out of it. And some have had their lives and livelihoods ruined by 
rage-mobs that swarm, feast like locusts, then move on to the next victim. With 
stories like that, why should I bother with social media? Why *would* I?

In addition, time spent on social media is time not spent writing (I'm with Neal 
Stephenson[1] on this one). I can either manage my Twitter feed or I can work on 
my next piece. I can't do both simultaneously. To me it's a pretty simple 
calculation: less stress and hassle in exchange for more productivity. That's 
why I don't use social media.

[1] https://www.nealstephenson.com/why-i-am-a-bad-correspondent.html

(c) 2022 by Andrew Gudgel 
email: contact [at] andrewgudgel.com