What Do I Do About Social Media?

The questions I'm asking myself about living in an overly connected world

Photo by Adem AY on Unsplash

In Embracing Curiosity, I step away from writing about travel to comment on the bigger journey of life, exploring my faith and politics with curiosity and nuance.

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I was not the first adopter of social media in our household.

My techy husband had a MySpace page. I found it interesting and a little novel that someone had devised a way for him to slowly reconnect with high school classmates less than a decade after our graduation. However, I was a busy teacher with far too much going on teaching and directing and I had no desire for something that would distract me from “real life.” I didn’t cave until Mark Zuckerburg got into the game and had designed a large enough network that I could reconnect with college friends and high school classmates and find out what was happening in their lives. Besides, it was the cool thing that brought all Gen-X, Xennials, and Milennials together, so why not join the party?

I actually got into Facebook early enough that I wasn’t a super late adopter. I joined in 2008, early enough to be able to announce my pregnancy with our daughter, share pictures of her shortly after her birth, and carefully document every unnecessary moment of our lives, from checking in to movie theaters to every photograph taken while on vacations. I never accepted a friend request from a student until after they graduated, and in those early years, I had certain students who couldn’t wait to make a Facebook request so that they could keep tabs on “Mrs. Styf.” I loved that I 1) had students who still wanted to keep in touch and 2) had a way to easily do so.

But somewhere along the way this purpose for social media, the opportunity to keep in touch with friends and family and share our lives with each other across the miles, got lost in the search for likes that would beat the algorithm and feed our baser instincts.

And I wasn’t immune.

I’ve ventured into a lot of different social media landscapes. Each form of social media has served its purpose and I’ve been thankful for the positive impact that each has had on my life.

I tried Google+ and that ended faster than it began.

Facebook helped me to keep in touch with people across the miles and the changes of life, which was especially important for someone who has moved as many times as I have throughout my lifetime. During the early days of the pandemic, it helped me find genuine connection with people who had been acquaintances before, but became true friends. It helped me reconnect with old friends as we all tried to make sense of the world we had been living in for four years and the mess of our relationships with loved ones as the pandemic and ugly election cycle dragged on.

Instagram gave me a new way to enjoy photography and see what others were doing. I joined Instagram really late, but did so when a friend suggested it was a way to get seen as a writer. Instead, I found a lot of travel and camping accounts and insight into writing and teaching ideas, all of which have both entertained and inspired me.

I tried to figure out LinkedIn while I was job hunting in the spring of 2021, but never really figured out how to effectively use it. Yet I still try posting on there to at least promote some of my writing.

Twitter introduced me to my people in the wake of 2016. In the wake of 2020, it helped me cope with the pandemic and then spiritual abuse and the realization that I wasn’t alone in my spiritual trauma story. It helped me find like-minded political moderates trying to embrace their political homelessness and fellow Christians working through deconstruction and reconstruction all while refusing to let go of Jesus and the belief in life eternal.

There’s been significant ugliness, but there have been moments that those online connections have saved me in more ways than one.

Social media has both united and divided us. It started with so much potential, but as most things when humans get their hands on it, it has suffered the effects of human nature. In the latest podcast episode of The Problem with John Stewart, Stewart commented, “When are we going to realize that every time there is a leap (in) a sort of communications technology, the world falls apart until it adjusts to it.” As I watch the apparent implosion of Twitter, which has been a lifeline for me for the last three years, I’m beginning to wonder if we’re now entering the adjustment phase.

Fear is a dangerous weapon, and I’ve seen social media play into our societal fears, including my own, in catastrophic ways. Social media was supposed to open doors to cross-cultural global communication, expanding our worlds and minds. Instead, as Jonathan Haidt argues in his Atlantic piece, it has actually condensed our worlds and made us “uniquely stupid.” Somedays I wonder if we’re too late to change course, but I want to believe that we can at least try.

I know people who do little with their social media. The only reason why my husband has anything posted is because I tag him in posts of our pictures and updates on our lives. I have a handful of friends who have never waded into the cesspool of social media. If I’m being honest, I don’t know that my life would necessarily be better without social media. Nearly 15 years into using some kind of social media platform, it is impossible to imagine my life without it.

But I also know that we were made for so much more than this.

I took some steps this past weekend to start being more intentional with my social media use. I’m actually somewhat grieving the collapse of Twitter, but I know that no matter what happens, I’ve made connects there that I will find a way to maintain. I started cleaning out my Facebook “friends” list and am proudly down to 681. (That’s down at least 30 people and I’m going to celebrate that as a win.) I took Facebook off of my phone until the end of the year because if I only post from my computer, I have to be more intentional. I’m taking baby steps and we’ll see how that goes.

I’ve also started asking myself hard questions: Am I holding onto “friends” because I've always had a hard time letting go of the past? Do I want to believe I matter more to people than I do? Do I keep thinking that I might want to return to that relationship someday? Do I still think that I can have an impact on that person?

But I’m also asking myself important questions about the past 15 years. Did I want to make a difference? Yes. Did I believe that those closest to me would carefully consider what I had to say and allow that to at least slightly influence the decisions they were making? Yes. But did it make a difference? Mostly, no. I’ve come to the painful conclusion that most of what I have posted in the last seven years hasn’t moved the needle at all. Did it make a difference? Yes, to the small number of people who haven’t blocked my posts or chosen to ignore what I had to say and instead took my words as either confirmation of their own beliefs or evidence that not all Christians were right-wing conspiracy theorists. I’ve had friends and former students thank me for speaking up when very few others in their lives were doing so, or they were saying horrible things that they found inexcusable. For better or for worse, those few counted on me to call it like we all saw it. But did it make a real difference? I honestly don’t know.

All this to say, I have no idea where I go from here. I have no idea if we are going to be able to right the ship in how we relate to each other and share our lives and exchange ideas. But I also know that I’m not the only person asking those questions and there are far smarter people than me struggling to find the answers.

Human beings will always be flawed, but I’m not willing to give up, because I believe that we are capable of so much more. In the meantime, I found this piece from Campfire Notebook be also be illuminating concerning the social media question.

#31: The End is the Beginning

And I also appreciated this post about what happened to one traveler when he no longer had access to data on his phone:.

I Accidentally Conducted a Social Media Experiment on Myself. I Really Like the Results.

In the end, I leave you with the words of my high school assistant principal, who closed out every end of day announcement with, “Be careful out there, it’s a rough world.”

It is, but that doesn’t mean we can try to make it better.

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