As 2023 gets underway, I’ve resolved to be less “virtually present” on social media, and more emotionally present in my own life. Hence, it’s unlikely I’ll be adding many new posts to my Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook accounts in the coming months.
Lowering one’s social-media profile might seem like a peculiar choice in 2023, given how much we have come to depend on it for sharing information and promoting our own projects. Moreover, I will acknowledge that online resolutions to cut down on social media use are a fairly common (and, in practice, not always a properly carried out) gesture. Still, my decision to cut back on social media this year has filled me with a sense of psychic freedom and relief.
The problem of “continuous partial attention”
My decision to use social media less this year is in part a matter of principle, since there is no shortage of information out there (the Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma comes to mind, as does Tim Wu’s book The Attention Merchants) about the distractions and dangers of algorithm-driven addictions and the anxieties attendant in performing a virtual life for a virtual world.
But at heart this decision stems from a simple desire to have more control over my own attention – and to avoid falling into an ongoing cycle of continuous partial attention – as my days on earth play out.
Putting The Vagabond’s Way out into the world late last year was a thrill. I enjoyed the events and interviews (including my first-ever New York Times Q&A) that came in tandem with its release. And there was an extent to which I enjoyed posting about the book and its themes on social media.
The more I interacted with my social media feeds, however, the more reflexive I became about opening my smartphone apps (or laptop browser tabs) to see what was “happening” on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. At a certain point, checking my social media feeds was not a conscious decision so much as it was muscle memory – a dopamine-sodden compulsion to check up on virtual interactions that bore little satisfying relation to my best self.
Hence, my resolution to cut back on social media posts in 2023. In sense, this decision is not unlike the spiritual rite of “fasting”: I aim to break the cycle of impulsiveness and false urgency by disrupting my media diet; I aim to put my relationship to “new information” into perspective by deliberately cutting it off for a period of time.
How to find out what I’m up to in 2023
All of this said, my social media “fast” will permit me to check my feeds a few times each week in 2023; I just won’t create many new posts in the coming year.
If you’re curious about what I’ve been up to in a given month this year, please subscribe to my Deviate podcast, sign up for one of my creative writing classes in Paris, drop in on my monthly discussions of travel and The Vagabond’s Way at The Nomadic Network’s online book club, or simply drop me a line by email. Here’s wishing everyone an abundance of real-world, non-virtual joy in 2023!
A postscript, of sorts
I had a curious conversation with a friend around the time I wrote the first draft of this post. When I complained to him that Twitter hadn’t been a very good source of traffic for my podcast (averaging just 2-15 click-throughs per promo post, despite having 10,000 Twitter followers), he suggested that I employ a more strategic approach to “engaging my audience” and gaming Twitter’s algorithm.
That might be rational enough advice, but it overlooks the increasingly obvious fact that platforms like Twitter are dictating the terms of the conversations we have on social media. It’s not in the interest of a venue like Twitter to showcase conversations that aren’t happening on (or, the very least, being shouted about on) Twitter, so its algorithm doesn’t incentivize them.
Being heard online thus becomes uncomfortably interwoven from being omnipresent online, which sounds like a lousy way to live.
My misgivings about social media aren’t unique to me. Like many, I enjoy the interactions I get on Instagram, yet it’s easy to acknowledge that this platform inevitably broadcasts a phony vision of what it’s like to be alive. I enjoy connecting with old friends on Facebook, as many people do, but I too grow weary of the political half-truths and performative self-righteousness on constant display there. Twitter is great at creating instant mini-communities (as I wrote about in the context of baseball fandom for The Atlantic many years ago), but it also invites the most reflexively toxic, context-averse interpretation of other people – and, at times, the world in general – that I see anywhere online.
My friend was pessimistic when I told him that I hoped this blog post would serve as a stand-in (as well as an explainer) for my lessened social media presence in 2023. “You can pin your blog-post link to the top of your social-media feeds,” he said, “but not many people will be incentivized to click through. Those who do click through,” he added, “probably won’t read till the end.”
He was probably right. So be it.
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