Mandy Brown wrote this lovely, thoughtful piece about attention, social media, and her own creative process. There’s a lot I love about Coming home. In particular, Mandy’s description of how being on social media has come to feel like a distraction so all-consuming that it is like a kind of madness felt familiar.
To step into the stream of any social network, to become immersed in the news, reactions, rage and hopes, the marketing and psyops, the funny jokes and clever memes, the earnest requests for mutual aid, for sign ups, for jobs, the clap backs and the call outs, the warnings and invitations—it can feel like a kind of madness. It’s unsettling, in the way that sediment is unsettled by water, lifted up and tossed around, scattered about. A pebble goes wherever the river sends it, worn down and smoothed day after day until all that’s left is sand.
About two months ago, I decided to take a break from Mastodon. The start of school was approaching, and I felt like too often the conversations on Mastodon were stealing my focus away from my son. I wanted to give him more of my attention in the remaining weeks of our summer vacation, so I signed off. I’ve found that I haven’t really missed it. I feel a palpable sense of relief being away.
It’s exhausting. It is, at this point in my life, unsustainable. I cannot dip into the stream, even briefly, and also maintain the awareness and focus needed to do my own work, the work that is uniquely mine.
I can’t predict the future, and I know better than to make a bold declaration like, “I’m done with social media forever,” but given the persistent sense of relief I’ve felt since signing off, it’s hard for me to imagine coming back.
A bit like Mandy, I decided to start posting shorter pieces on my website so that I could share things I thought were worth sharing without being on social media, although I made the odd choice of publishing RSS-only notes instead of POSSE’ing my posts to Mastodon or elsewhere. This decision slows down the publishing process, which is a feature, not a bug.
I find that what I need is some friction, some labor, the effort to work things out. Efficiency is an anti-goal; it is at odds with the work, which requires resistance and tension in order to come into being.
I’ve written before about exactly this, albeit in a different context. Introducing slower, manual processes is often valuable; faster is not always better. Too much efficiency, too much automation, removes the space for thoughtfulness. (Mandy has an insightful tangent here about the potential effects of generative AI on the creative process.)
What I like about sharing links in posts such as this one is that I don’t just copy-pasta the link into Mastodon and hit “Toot!” I put some thought into why I think the link is worth sharing. I read it over a few times and ask myself, “what am I trying to say about this?” or, “why do I think this is important and worth someone’s time?” Hopefully, as a result, I share less, but what I share has more value.