Rethinking social media

A couple weeks ago I decided to take a break from Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. I was feeling (am feeling) like those three places take up too much of my time and attention, leaving me somewhat disconnected from the actual place where I live and the real people who live here.

One positive effect of this decision: I’ve been posting a lot more on my blog, which I mostly used for poetry and the occasional essay or crowd-sourced list. I like posting more to the blog. It’s fun to create the content, and also nice to have complete control of it, rather than ceding that control to FB and Twitter and Instagram.

I set up this blog to automatically post to Twitter, so whenever I write something new, one tweet gets sent. And there are a small number of people who also subscribe via the RSS feed. That means a fairly consistent number of visitors every day. Not a huge number, but something. I never go on Twitter, I just let the blog do the work. I think same system might work for Facebook, too.

So I’m going to turn my account back on and then set up the blog to post to FB. I won’t go on Facebook itself, other than to occasionally set up local events. Facebook has been very useful for that, and I think it’s a mistake to give that up. But I’m not going to look at Facebook comments or read messages. I don’t have any social media apps on my phone, either. If you want to respond to what I post, you’ll need to do it here on the blog, or via email.

I’d like people to see what I create, and most of the people I know locally see my work through FB. The people I know (or “know”) in other places follow it on Twitter. It may turn out that once my FB account is activated, I’ll find that I can’t resist it. If so, I’ll turn it off again. But for now, I’m going to give this experiment a try.