I stumbled upon this excellent post from the Indieweb wiki page, going down rabbit warrens as I do. It was written back in April 2021 called Social Media Isn’t Going to Save You From Social Media.

In particular, scroll (!) your eye down to the section titled, “Convenience for the People; Power for the Corporations” where he says:

“It’s hard to go back from ‘free’ and so the power remains with the few, enormous corporations and everyone complains, but nothing changes.”

Personally, I believe we have lost the game.

We are too far gone as a society because we are now an addicted society.

Addicted to our screens, our attention has been hijacked, our mental health and wellbeing affected.

In the past, I used to run sessions about how to use these social media apps “for good” – using them for personal learning, networking, building relationships and showing and sharing your work.

I also presented on building your own blog, an online space that could be your portfolio of work and whereby you could share on social networks to have conversations in your own space. I encouraged graduates to build their own sites so they can show and share their work and learning but many misunderstood me – to them, they thought I was telling them to be ‘influencers’ or to build these to market products and services.

I used to also teach people and graduates about RSS Readers and how to set up these accounts so that they could manage the overwhelm.

However, I think it was all for nought.

Those days are well and truly gone because even if you’re one of the few doing this, you’re surrounded by millions of others plus spammers, trolls and bots that weaken your voice, blatantly steal your work, or ready to have arguments over nothing.

Why would anyone want to fight this? It’s easier to bow out of it altogether with your sanity intact.

Thanks to the algorithms now, much of what I espoused in the past seems to be “outdated” (not that it was in vogue anyway) or quaint – maybe a sniff of naivety.

I think like the author says in this article, “there’s no going back to the internet of the early and mid-2000s” because no matter how much I try, I think the horse has bolted with this.

Despite my own personal knowledge mastery practices not changing (albeit I have permanently deleted social media), I am not seeing evidence that others what to change their practices because at the moment, it’s simply too much more time consuming to create your blog and to seek out new network spaces without sacrificing everything over to the algorithm.

We are addicted.

The sooner we face up to it, the sooner we can make amends to start managing it for the benefit of our health and the relationships of those around us.

Photo by Lisa Fotios on Pexels.com