Before I go (off social media)

I was reporting traffic in Halifax when several of my colleagues told me about Facebook. I signed up. Within days, we were sharing photos and updating each other with the minutiae of our lives. Our boss sent a station-wide email with the subject line, ‘Too much facetime on Facebook’. We scaled back our use, at least at work. But at home, I dutifully added details about my hometown, the schools I attended, the interests I had. It was exciting, and as someone who racked up stints on GeoCities, Blogspot, and MySpace, I relished this new opportunity to share my core being with the world. And just like my periods posting on the previous platforms, hoped activity on Facebook would garner attention, praise, and validation.

I was inside an auditorium in Sheridan College in the spring of 2009 when one of my communications professors extolled the value of Twitter as a microblogging platform. He played an animated video that simultaneously promoted and derided the social media platform. It seemed an utterly unnecessary way of communicating with the world. “So I’m supposed to write that I just ate a sandwich?” I asked a few of my classmates. I still created an account the next day.

I was reporting traffic in Toronto when my friend Elle held up her phone against the sound-blunting glass that separated our studios and showed me Instagram. “It’s all about photos, I think you’d really like it,” she said. The prominence of visuals did indeed draw me in, and having mild confidence in my ability to take photos, I signed up and started posting images I thought the world would surely appreciate me for. Because no one else has ever taken a photo of a sunset. Or flowers. Or a rainbow.

Over the last 15 or so years, I’ve put plenty of my thoughts and images and experiences out there for anyone who wanted to see them. It’s been gratifying and fun, and it’s led to opportunities that I never imagined, like being able to attend conferences to share my experience with ulcerative colitis, and meeting wonderful members of the inflammatory bowel disease community in person. I’m grateful for those opportunities, and I still hope somehow that I can garner more of them. But if I can, it’s going to have to come from something other than my social accounts, because I’m shutting them down.

There are many reasons why closing my Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook accounts (I’m keeping LinkedIn because I still need to work), but perhaps the overarching reason is this: it’s not fun anymore.

Friends become followers

I used to enjoy the way social media extended friendship from the offline world to the online one. Facebook connections are labelled as friends. And even though Facebook still uses that moniker, the term follower, which is how most other social platforms describe your connections, seems more apt. In my desire to grow my friend/follower lists, I ended up accepting connections from people I had transient contact with in the real world, if any. There have been times when I struggled to remember who someone labelled as a Facebook friend even was. Did I really know this person? Have we ever met?

It’s not that I can’t communicate with legitimate friends on social media, but if I can contact those people through phone, text, or email, is there really a need for another channel that publicizes those communications? The most meaningful digital exchanges I’ve had with people were not public presentations, and I rather like it that way.

Really bad theatre

Facebook is filled with crackpot theories about how the world really works and what ‘they’ don’t want you to know, Instagram is a vanity fair, and Twitter is cesspool of self-righteousness and virtue signalling. What ties all this rubbish together is the feeling that everything is performative. Every post is meant to showcase how smart or attractive or successful or happy or woke someone is.

On top of that, so much of what you see is repetition. I do wonder if people realize how unoriginal they really are, or if they know it and don’t care. Let’s say a celebrity’s name is trending on Twitter. Search for that name and I can almost promise you’ll find a series of posts to the effect of “I saw [name] trending and I thought he/she died. Thank goodness I was wrong!” [relieved GIF]. Great. Thanks for sharing that rapier wit of yours.

Same thing with news stories and politics. I get it, you don’t like [political leader/political party/political issue]. Do you really need to make that public declaration time and time again? When all your followers are like-minded, as they probably are, are you engaging in a discussion, or an echo chamber? Are we doing all the precious talking about things which is supposedly the first step to solving problems, or are we all just whining? The myriad of hackneyed posts – and pieces from news outlets, I should point out – about benign things being racist or sexist or transphobic or whatever signifies the latter.

The idiom “nobody likes a complainer” used to be true, but social media, and increasingly traditional media, encourages everyone to complain under the guise of calling things out. But don’t you dare complain about the prevailing, purportedly progressive agenda that consumes the discourse on both social and traditional media, lest you be branded xenophobic, misogynistic, etc., told you’re on the wrong side of history, and cancelled from the career you’ve spent decades building.

It all makes for a terrible, tiresome show. One that I’m happy to turn away from.

Moving to minimalism

I love minimalism, but I’ll be the first to admit I’m a poor minimalist. I have more shit than I really need, but I’m constantly trying to trim the fat. Keeping a bunch of social profiles I rarely use and don’t really enjoy doesn’t make sense. My social profile shutdown is part of a wider, ongoing job to simplify as much of my life as possible – from digital accounts to physical possessions to finances.

Professional posting

One thing I’m ambivalent about is the fact that even after I close my personal accounts, I’ll still need to be on social media for work. On one hand, this lets me stay up to date with dank memes and I can keep one of my marketable skills sharp. On the other hand, I still have to be exposed to all the rubbish social media offers so diligently. Ideally, I’d make a clean break from all social media, but I recognize that marketing and communications jobs now require social media skills, so I’ll still have to log some time each day on the major platforms – which in itself is a terrific reason to limit my time on social by closing my personal accounts.

Parting thanks

While the content and combativeness of social media has soured me over the last few years, there was a time when it was enriching and empathetic. My interactions with the inflammatory bowel disease community have been invaluable, and I’ll always be grateful for the compassion and good humour shown to me by people with Crohn’s, colitis, an ostomy, or a j-pouch. I’m grateful as well for the chance to engage not only with patients, but also doctors, nurses, charities, researchers, pharmaceutical companies, and other groups that work to cure Crohn’s and colitis and support patients until that day comes.

I know there will always be IBD-ers who seek support from the online world, and I hope my blog can still serve them in some way, but there’s no shortage of advocates who they can turn to on social. I’m not much use in that space anymore, and that’s fine by me.

There’s an often-used refrain from people who blog/post about health challenges: when someone is doing well, they’ll spend more time living their life and less time writing about it. If the peaks and valleys in my blog post frequency are anything to go by, I’d say that refrain is true. But even though I’m fortunate enough to be in decent shape as a result of my j-pouch, there’s still plenty in my life I’m unhappy about; I just don’t feel compelled to share it with anyone. I’d rather be quiet than a complainer, and I’m quite looking forward to more silence.