I’m Out…
It was early 2005. I was a senior at the University of Georgia. I heard rumblings of something called “The” Facebook. At that point, it was a social media site open to those with a university email address. I signed up and started the journey of social media. Back then, none of us really knew what we were doing. We posted what we were eating for lunch. We’d just tell everyone, “Hey.” We were wild, I tell you. Buck wild. At this time, we were also still deep in Tom’s grip on MySpace, figuring out a world that was rapidly digitizing before our eyes.
I’m what some would call a Xennial. I was born in 1982, so I am young enough to have adapted easily to the digitizing world, but old enough to know the world before the pixels took over. I also grew up poor in the rural South. Dial-up was about all we had for the entirety of my youth. If we wanted to use the Internet, we had to tie up the phone line and listen to the sounds of Neo entering The Matrix before being notified that we “had mail.” It was a different time.
20 years have passed since that very innocent Facebook post of “Adam’s eating a ham sandwich.” I’m a father now. I’m a professor. I am trained in data analysis and how to approach the world empirically. I no longer see social media the way I did back then. Now, I see something far more nefarious, to lean dramatic. I watch my daughter receive endless messages about how she should look, what she should laugh at, and how she should think about the world. I watch my son encounter ads that target his youth and seek to exploit the fact that he’s likely to click in fear to a message that his “computer has been hacked.” They’re out to make a buck and get some data from his amygdala .
Beyond my immediate circle, I also analyze the ways in which I now interact with all these platforms. It is no longer a simple avenue to connect with people I care about. Instead, it is a space for grandstanding amidst an endless supply of reels and advertisements designed to manipulate my behavior in a capitalistic society. The Algorithm is king now.
Anecdotally, I find social media making me think poorly about people I care about as soon as my opinion differs from theirs. That’s not normally who I am, but it is who I am becoming. That’s hard to say out loud. But, after all, I too am a brain full of water and electricity, malleable and manipulatable. I don’t like who that plugged-in-person is becoming. I like the me that loves his friends… and loves the people he disagrees with most.
The kicker for me was a quantitative look at my screen time. Have you ever taken a look at yours? Of course you have… You probably brush if off, though. I challenge you to do something I’ve been trying to do this week:
Think of time as a finite resource. Then, think of the thing you want to do most with your time. Now, get that metric from your screen time report. Take one day and instead of devoting that time to a screen, devote it to the thing you want to do most with your time. This week, I had a day where I spent 4 straight hours just hanging out with my kids, screen free, during hours we usually all had devices glued to our eyeballs. We walked to the park, looked for shark’s teeth on the beach, talked about their day, and planned out fun things for tomorrow. I felt alive, friends. That time was better than any reel I’ve ever seen.
So, I’m out. I’m stepping away from the world of social media. I’m unplugging, but for a purpose. This site is about inclusive education. It’s about considering how we work toward inclusive education as a human right. To accomplish that, I don’t have 4 hours a day to spare piddlin’ around on nonsense.
I find myself now in the “in between times,” much like those early days of the Xennial tech era. I don’t want to close my accounts entirely, because they connect me to people I love. But, simultaneously, they separate me from the people I love too. Still, I have to maintain a way to find out when Laid Back Country Picker is playing or to see what’s up with the Alt National Park Service.
For now my accounts will exist in limbo until I think of a better way to stay connected to the people I love in my outer circles. But I’m pulling the plug on my daily interaction with those spaces. I may pop in from time to time to see how everyone’s kids are doing and to post a photo of the woods every now and again.
I ain’t blowing up my TV or throwing away my paper, and as much as I’d like to move to the country, I got responsibilities here in the Charleston suburbs… but I tell you what, I’m about to find myself again.
Sorry, Algorithm.