Writers and Social Media

I will never have a deathbed moment where I say, I wish I’d spent more time on social media. Yet in the past, I’ve enjoyed scrolling the same way I enjoy eating too many Andes mints—it’s a great way to procrastinate odious tasks. So much artificial zing, so little satisfaction. And oh, Twitter was good for zing. One-liners, aggrieved threads, bite-sized courses in epidemiology and ecology, the revolution(s), books I should read, literary think-pieces. Even without the trolls and troglodytes, the microblogs of a billion users have served up, over the years, more than my brain can eat in a lifetime; and always with a suspicion that all those tweets and posts and so-called stories are eating a little of my brain in return.

New Year’s resolutions are loose around here. But for 2023, mine go something like this: Protect my serenity. Compress my social media time to planned “office hours.” Cultivate Substack, Mastodon, a tame Twitter feed, curated Instagram lists, and a modicum of self-control. Find a way to filter an unnatural amount of information into something human-scale, useful, and maybe even beautiful.

I’ll focus this advice on four platforms—Instagram, Twitter, Mastodon, and Substack. I also have a personal Facebook account but check it rarely. I don’t use TikTok. Here is how you can cultivate some filters around fast-scrolling, flashy, colorful, shiny, distracting, addicting feeds, and make your social media feed less of a vortex and more like an orderly place that feeds you.

Click here to read the rest of this article on my Substack, The Bird’s Eye!