I was astonished to find that three different people have already noticed that I deactivated my social media accounts. I would have never imagined. Part of me assumed that no one would notice, and certainly, I don’t really feel like anyone SHOULD have noticed. But, strangely, it happened. Certainly that will drop off at some point.
The impulse to scroll through something when there is the smallest lull in everyday life is still very strong. Certainly this morning, when I first woke up, I really wanted to log back in. But I’m still resisting, for the moment. I wonder if it will last?
I DID export my FB content, and looked a little at the data. I first got on FB in 2007, then bailed on it for a few years. Because I tried to delete that original account, I couldn’t “re-login,” so I had to make a new account… and used the same account since then. (For 12 years.) I did take occasional breaks, I noticed… sometimes for months at a time. But since Covid I’ve been posting daily. Many, many… many times a day. It was not good.
In 12 years I posted over 10,300 times to FB. That’s 860 posts a year. Almost two and a half times a day.
Over half of the posts I made were about radio or shows I was playing, doing a “spot check” on my posts. And, more pointedly, the first several years I was on, it was almost ALL radio posts. It was really only about half way into that 12 year span that I started to get personal VERY regularly. I think the main issue there was that, usually, I would give up entirely on this blog, and all of that energy would wind up on social media.
Unfortunately, a fair amount of my more recent social media use has been downbeat. And, by my own hand, I think I’ve driven away anyone who would look at my social media accounts, leaving behind people that I don’t really know, except through music and radio.
Even more sad: I made about 10,000 other kinds of posts to FB that were not my actual posts: comments on other peoples posts, or engaging with other content in a pretty consistent way. I was just constantly looking for a community to engage in, never realizing that it was hours and hours of my life, being drained away, with no way for me to really re-direct that time toward… radio or ‘zines.
Sobering, for sure. Hopefully I can focus on how much energy I lost, and use that as a way of keeping me away from it in the future.
We’ll see.
Austin Rich 