The idea of contributing to social media makes me wince involuntarily. The unrelenting fakeness. Don't get me wrong, I am A-OK with being fake - I worked in sales - but not all the time, surely. Not in your spare time?
I hate the Instagrammed faces, I hate the humble-brag Facebook posts and I hate the mire of Twitter trolls. I hate that I know what breakfast people have had. Nobody needs to know what breakfast anyone had. Mostly, I hate that my husband posts photos of me halfway up an arduous mountain walk where I look like a fat angry bogan and because I am never on social media I don't know about it until I get gleeful texts from friends.
The usual fakeness of social media never infects anything I post. Normal social media fakery involves pouty-lipped poses, boats and tediously planning a selfie specifically for Instagram. My fakeness involves pretending to be a) normal and b) not the place where happiness goes to die.
Social media is fine for people who are naturally filled with sunshine and a genuine optimism about the world, but I am, unfortunately, afflicted with a personality that finds terrible things funny and can detect a cloud in every silver lining. Because of this, I usually pretend to be a whole different (and much better) person most of the time. It is exhausting turning what is going on in my head (Your child is a monster) into words that don't make other people actively dislike me (Oh no! It's fine! Isn't it wonderful they are having such fun!). As a result, I currently spend a fair amount of mental energy every week avoiding small-talk with people I don't know well and now the idea of voluntarily doing this online fills me with a quiet dread.
Alongside the fact that my flourishing diaspora of neurosis prevents me from ever really enjoying social media, there are many other (more sane) reasons to dislike it. When I was researching for my last business, a friend recommended I read Hooked, by Nir Eyal. Hooked is about how social media companies build in virtual rewards, triggering dopamine hits to ensure people spend as much time as possible on their sites. It was truly chilling and ever since when I see people Twittering I get flashes of rats tapping the crack cocaine lever in a particularly grim science experiment.
I sound like a Luddite, but I am really not. I love technology and the internet. I delight in cat videos, memes and the fact there is a community for everyone. Before the internet you were just the town weirdo, now you are connected to all the other town weirdos, and this is something truly wonderful. There is a subreddit for bread stapled to trees that has over 160,000 members. No longer are you just the local loon stapling your sandwich to a pine tree and cackling to yourself. Now you get virtual love for doing so from people around the world who also have altogether too much spare time on their hands and an odd sense of humour.
But social media is something else. It results in circles of people agreeing with each other, and this makes mad ideas seem more sane. It reduces politics and news to what is shareable. It contributes to anxiety and depression. And, at its zenith of evil, it was used to get that orange buffoon into one of the most powerful jobs in the world.
While my Facebook could easily go unseen for months, every time I go to delete it I am stopped by the best thing about social media; sharing puerile nonsense with your friends. My account's latest reprieve was due to an '80s rock video made by someone with very little budget, but the editing knowledge of the fade in, a horse, five keyboards stuck to scaffolding and quite a lot of unfounded self-belief.
Of course, I am sure some (less neurotic) people get value from social media and some people do get a genuine connection. I am just not one of those people. But I am still opening a Facebook page tomorrow, so you can look forward to more rants like this in another medium. It will be me and the over-30s shouting marketing messages at each other and sprinkled with people taking online surveys about what monkey they look like while their data is being harvested.
