It’s been interesting to go through the last five months without social media.
I permanently deleted Twitter in June this year and I can say that I don’t miss it at all but there were a few things I did before and after to ensure that I didn’t feel entirely disconnected and isolated from people. After all, if you have spent more than a decade or more on it, you have an entire body of work – and life – and connections that you will miss once you get off it.
Closing down social media and networks is akin to saying goodbye to a lot of things – and hello to many much nicer things.
For me, it wasn’t just quitting Twitter, (a platform that I wrote about for many years and which has helped me in my own work in Learning & Development), it was also deleting LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat – the whole lot of them and only keeping my YouTube channel and this blog.
It was a decision to finally bite the bullet and take charge of the next phase of my life – a life that would see me through my 50s, 60s and beyond.
Would I still be known as “ActivateLearn?”
“What does even ActivateLearn mean anymore?”
Getting rid of social media meant a complete re-think of my own identity.
Who IS Helen Blunden? Who WILL she be? Am I still ActivateLearn? (More like ActivateMe now!)
Most of all, I had to stop the checking of the social media feeds to learn what the others were doing, following, saying, replying or posting.
I had wasted enough time on other people. It was time to focus on me.
Something in my brain just “switched” overnight.
I see now that it was accruing for some time over the course of the last couple of years. This need for a complete shake up. To do something shocking so that I could reboot because to be frank, I didn’t like how a lot of things were panning out in the world of enterprise social networks – nor how things were so addictive and toxic in the public social networks.
In particular, public social networks were creating these odd content marketing behaviours and language in the workplace and their enterprise social networks that I couldn’t stand (“be a brand”, “create content to build a following inside your company”, “be an influencer within your company” “become first on the leaderboards”, “gamification”, etc). The public social networks were creating these new ego-centric, competitive and individualistic behaviours and expectations within the workplace that didn’t align to any of the messages I was espousing around social, learning and community. In fact, it made me come across as a luddite for asking people NOT to follow what others were doing outside.
In the end, I lost heart in my own work too because it was rendered meaningless and unvalued.
As I said to my friend recently, “I had to slowly erase myself from existence” in some way because I felt that this was what was happening to me anyway. I could just make it go quicker by taking the reins and steering it for myself.
I felt that it had to get to this point – in order to bring about a true transformative change. I was compelled to walk away from everything, make a clean break and begin a new life.
So I got off social media, stopped my projects with people, changed my thinking – and I resigned from work (I stayed longer with the last organisation but in hindsight I should have left much earlier) with absolutely no idea of what to do next; where my life will take me.
Getting off social media started me on an intense period of self-reflection which made me radically question everything that I had created and shared on it over the years.
Some people thought I was too hasty in my decision, I should have just made it private or not tweeted.
Yes, I could have done all that but if you’re not actively participating in the online conversations then WHY do you need your profile?
Others have said that our social media profiles is a way that people can contact us.
However, I would argue that it’s not the only way. People can Google you, they can ask around, and they can find you if they need to. I would say that the people who make an effort to seek you out and contact you are worth knowing more than the others who just follow your account so you can follow them back. These petty tit for tat games of power online – of building followings or being seen to be connected to some people are frankly, for me, tedious and childish.
Getting off Twitter meant that I started to question everything I did in the past.
My relationships with people I knew, (or thought I knew); I questioned WHY I shared the things I shared online and I unpeeled the onion layer seeking questions as to WHAT exactly social media was providing me in my life and WHAT gap it was filling plus WHAT gaps it was creating in my life and relationships.
It made me realise that social media for me was an EXPRESSION OF MY CREATIVITY and the conversations with people all around the world. Most of all, I loved that it connected me to people globally whom I could get involved in different projects, events, conferences.
To me, different ideas meant a burst of wonderful creativity for me which fired me up. That was when I felt the most, “ME”.
However, with time, I started to feel that social media was becoming negative, cynical, competitive, sinister. I used to get this feeling of ‘one sidedness’ which irked me. Putting out ideas, support, praise for people but feeling like some were holding back, or worse, using your work for their own gains.
Similarly, I couldn’t get the same traction with finding new groups, new ideas. People in my field shared less, they didn’t become involved in deeper conversations or they left Twitter. To many, social media was a broadcast platform for their business products and services. To others, it was to find a place to vent. There was a build up of cult-like behaviours around some so-called ‘thought leaders’ which were nonsensical to me.
So I started to think that for me, I need to be inspired for my creative outputs but I shouldn’t rely on Twitter anymore because already the environment there had changed. It was less about connections and more about advertising, marketing, broadcasting, spamming and trolling. That’s not an online world I want to be a part of – instead, I’d like to create my own world for the next phase of my life and I don’t want to be influenced by others.
References
Here’s some posts about my experiences without social media
Social Media is Not Going to Save You From Social Media
Should I Stay on LinkedIn or Go?
Changes I’ve Experienced Without Social Media in My Life
Hibernating LinkedIn and Moving My CV Here
My YouTube Channel Causes Me To Radically Rethink Everything About What I Put Out There
Very well said. A lot of your thoughts and reflections mirror my own. I’m not going to fully quit Twitter or social media in general, but this period of self-adjustment is definitely more possible because I’m able to justify cutting back and shattering habits of using it so frequently. Thanks!
Thank you for reading!
Firstly, thank you Helen for sharing such an open and thought-provoking post, even though I imagine this only touches the surface of the introspection you have been going through.
I too recognise the “content marketing” tropes all over the place when it comes to social networks (calling them social media reinforces the “broadcast” way of thinking IMHO).
As you have probably spotted, quite a few people are “shifting house” over to Mastodon in the last couple of weeks. At the risk of generalising after 2 days experience (!), it feels a lot like the early 2000’s over there – have been reconnecting with people I used to interact with (and some interesting new people too).
Not expecting to see you in elephant land, I think you have moved on too far to see value in any online network now, but (perhaps naively) it looks like there might be a whole different flavour of social being (re-)created.
Hello Julian. Thanks for this. Yeah I was on mastodon for a while a few years back and tried it a bit recently again. However my mindset wasn’t in the right frame to get back into it all over again so I deleted the two accounts I had there. I’m going to leave it for now as I’m not ready to face online socials again. I’m liking that I just have my writing on this blog and my YouTube channel. Thanks for reading and responding and enjoy the conversations on Mastodon! Let’s hope they don’t wreck that one too.