My relationship with social media has been something of a tragic love story. I fell deeply in love, it changed the course of my life, and then everything fell apart. The relationship became toxic, it became clear that social media was doing me more harm than good, but it had a hold over me that was hard to break out of. Now, as I try to walk away, I’m finding there is a pull that keeps tugging at my heart (or, rather, at the dopamine receptors in my brain). Will I be able to move on? What does the future hold for me without something that has been such a huge part of my life for so long? And, ultimately, is social media any good for our happiness?
Falling in love
In 2006, I graduated from university. As I was preparing to head out into the big wide world, a friend said to me, “Have you heard about this thing called Facebook? We can all join it and use it to keep in touch.”
Yes, I am that old. I remember a time when Facebook was brand new technology. At this point in its early history, you could only join if you had a university email address - so we all rushed to join while our accounts were still valid. And, at that time, I absolutely loved it. It was a great space to keep in touch with all my university friends as we spread out across the country, and also offered us a way to share and store photos - if you’re a Gen-Zer, you have to understand how groundbreaking this was for us. We’d only just got used to being able to store photos on computers - it was still a novelty not to have to go to a shop to have your photos physically printed (and to have to wait until then to discover whether you’d managed to get your own face in the photo, and whether everyone had their eyes open).
I went to work in the charity sector, in fundraising and communications. Now Facebook was growing in popularity, and you no longer had to be a university student to get an account. I saw that businesses had begun to build a presence on the platform, using it in a number of innovative ways, and I saw an opportunity. It seems wild, now, that I had to go to the board of the charity I was working at to pitch to them why we should give Facebook a try. They were dubious at first, seeing it as a fad, and not something that they really understood. But they let me give it a go.
And then I was totally hooked. As a communications tool, it was amazing. In those days, if you set up a business page, you could easily, and practically overnight, get hundreds of people to follow you. Not only that, but almost all of them would see all the content you posted in their feeds. Which meant they would engage, and you could build a real community. From an organisational point of view, we now had instant and real-time two-way interaction with our supporters and service users - they could leave feedback, we could ask questions, we could put them in contact with other useful organisations, all within one platform. It felt truly magical. I decided this was where I wanted to focus my career - I left the charity sector and went to work for a digital agency. I spent the next eight years working in social media marketing.
For me personally, too, I found the ability to build connections incredible. Twitter appeared on the scene, and, as a writer, I was able to interact with authors, publishers, editors and agents that I admired and respected. I made so many great friends, and some valuable professional connections. In those days, the sense of genuine community on these platforms was wonderful. It felt like social media was a tool to bring the world closer together.
The dark side
I’m not sure at what point it all started to go wrong, but, once the platforms discovered the value of advertising, we were all screwed. The algorithms became, at first slowly and gradually, then at speed, tailored towards paid content. Now we’ve reached a point where, if you don’t pay, you struggle to be seen. By the time I left the digital marketing world in 2018, I was advising businesses that didn’t currently have a Facebook page not to set one up unless they had a big budget, and I was seeing reach and engagement plummet for everyone. The beautiful sense of community that I had known personally had started to fall apart, and Twitter - the platform I had loved the most and where I had found the most connection - had become a space for people to scream at each other and where no one was safe from abuse.
Facebook was initially created to objectify female Harvard students, and TwiX is now run by a man who has been accused of abusive behaviour towards his first wife, and of sexually assaulting a flight attendant. So maybe we shouldn’t be surprised that the Meta family and the-platform-formerly-known-as-Twitter are somewhat of a moral vacuum. And they are morally bankrupt spaces - they have purposefully been designed to be addictive, to give us those little bursts of dopamine that our brains crave so obsessively. It’s telling that the senior leaders of most tech companies say that they don’t allow their kids to have smartphones or to use social media - they know how the sausages are made.
Far from being a space for joyful connection, social media had become, for me, a place of anxiety. I was finding myself unable to stay away from it, suddenly realising I was scrolling through an app without even having been aware of picking up my phone. It was distracting me from the real humans around me, even my kids. I hated that I wasn’t properly present with my children when my phone was in the room, and I tried hard to leave it somewhere else, but the pull to go and get it was extraordinary.
I hated being addicted to something that I didn’t even enjoy. Reading posts would just make me angry - there would be posts about terrible things that had happened to get riled up about, arguments taking place to be angered by, news of tragedies to feel distressed about, and people hurling abuse at each other. Posting myself didn’t feel any better - the ever-decreasing reach made me feel like I was screaming into a void, and that the effort I put into my content was wasted. When people did engage, there would inevitably be at least one person who wanted to tell me why I deserved to die for having a different opinion to them. Particularly when an article of mine appeared in a paper. And yet I kept on coming back.
I posted on Notes a little while ago about the fact that I’ve seen a lot of people saying they’re leaving social media. A big part of me wanted to be one of them, to just walk away from it all. But those people all had huge followings - if they announced they were leaving Instagram, thousands of people would follow them to Substack. For me, with my 577 followers on Instagram, no one was going to miss me if I left. My worry was that I would just disappear altogether. And, for someone building a career in the creative industries, that’s not so good. One of the things commissioning editors will look at when deciding whether to sign a potential new author is their social media following - does this person have an audience already that we can market their book to? It’s not the deciding factor, of course, and I’ve managed to get one book deal without a huge following. But still, it’s a worry. Could I build enough of a profile without social media to make a living as a writer? But then, could I build enough of a profile on social media anyway?
That post on Notes provoked a lot of discussion, which I was very grateful for. The thing that most stood out to me was that several people pointed out I’d begun the whole thing by saying that I hated social media - if that’s my starting position, then of course the platform won’t be a success. If it’s not something I enjoy, or at least that I’m not currently using in a way that I enjoy, how can I expect it to be effective?
Interestingly, I’ve had this post in drafts for a while, and this morning I listened to a great discussion between
and . They also talked about the mindset that you bring to social media, and how that will influence your experience of it. If you’re telling yourself that you’re too small, that it’s a waste of time, that it can’t be authentic, or whatever story you have about social media, then that will be true for you. But if you can find a way to use it that does work for you and the way you want to authentically show up and create in the world, then you can make it be what you want it to be. The replay of that conversation is available on - it’s well worth a watch!Time to leave?
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