A fellow entrepreneur once told me that there are really 3 types of people in the world: Those in the parade, those watching the parade, and those who weren’t even aware that a parade was being held that day.
It was about 6 months ago today, on September 22nd, that I decided to take a break from social media. Since then, I’ve been on sidelines, watching the action go by from the bleachers.
Despite more than a few people telling me I’d never be able to keep my promise, I’ve successfully managed not to post or like anything on my social media accounts (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc).
It all started at the BitNorth unconference organized by Alistair Croll and friends in a remote part of Quebec wilderness. After being quite active on social media for the past years, I thought a break could be an interesting experiment.
The first few days
On day one, I definitely felt an unnatural void. The beast was calling me to feed it.
The next day, it was a bit better. Of course, it was hard to resist liking a photo of a friend completing a marathon, or of an acquaintance having her first child.
Oddly, later that same day, local journalist Patrick Lagacé also decided to disconnect from social media completely. He even traded his smartphone for a flip-phone and wrote a number of hilarious articles on the surreal experience of being completely disconnected. The next day, the Huffington Post even wrote a piece about both of our sudden disconnections. It asked whether it was even “possible to exist without social media”?
After a few weeks, I started thinking about it less and less and eventually to not even think about it at all. I noticed I became more hands-on and engaged in reality, in the real personal and professional relationships in my life.
Six months later, my answer is yes. You can definitely live a fulfilling life outside of the social media arena.
That said, it hasn’t been easy to stay disconnected, especially when my natural inclination is to make/produce/create rather than to consume.
What I learned
Deciding to not post online is somewhat like deciding not to talk for 6 months. As you can imagine, when you silence your voice, you immediately start to shift focus on listening more to others. You start noticing new things. This also brought me a new sense of consciousness and empathy. That said, when you listen a lot, you also realize how much noise is in the daily feed of your life.
In today’s society, we tend to abuse of free things. Water, natural resources, occasionally visits to the ER at the hospital (in Canada). Social media has now essentially made “airspace” free.
That’s generally a good thing. Lowering the barrier to communication has allowed several billion humans to express themselves in new and creative ways, which has definitely moved the world forward. Social media is the best megaphone ever built to amplify our content, thoughts and moods.
The newsfeed is also a magical source of discovery. Just in the past days, the feed brought to me the news of an amazing technological advancement (self-driving cars at Tesla), a very hopeful scientific development that could bring hope of preventing the spread of communicable diseases like Ebola (this article featuring DARPA) and even a wonderful ode to gumption (this expletive-filled rant by entrepreneurs Gary Vaneyrchuk). Social media makes finding such gems easy, which is especially useful when mainstream media fails to deliver news tailored to our specific interests.
In past decades, an extremely limited set of folks created media for everyone else. Folks like Benjamin Franklin, Charlie Chaplin, Johnny Carson, Orson Wells, Edward Murrow, Hunter Thompson, Walter Cronkite and their limited teams of acolytes produced the content that tens of millions would consume.
Today, the ratio has changed. Each one of us is now armed with tools to easily create and massively broadcast content to thousands if not millions around us. That’s a wonderful scenario, but should there not be some notion of responsibility around this new unbounded freedom? Should we really leave the algorithm in charge of parsing these mountains of information?
What if there were a form of “mindful communication”? This would essentially be a way to produce content more responsibly.
Towards “mindful communication”
If each social media post you published cost you 5$, would you post it? Often, the answer is no.
In the age of tweetstorming our every thought, instagraming our brunch, snapchating our body and now meerkating our life, we can pause to ask what fraction of this communication volume is really useful. Sure, we all have the right to express ourselves (and don’t get me wrong, it can definitely be a lot of fun to share daily tidbits from our lives with friends!), but until our newsfeed algorithms evolve to perfectly guess what each of us would like to read, each post is also consuming resources (bandwidth, servers, power, reader time) and creating the commensurate task for others to consume your content. It’s not because you can leave the lights on 24/7 that you should.
In coming back to the web, my main hope is start contributing healthily again, but probably to like/post less frequently. It’s really been great to renew focus on the offline world and the human relationships outside of the online social network. It’s so easy to get sucked in to the illusory obligation of keeping up with the feed.
So there it is, my main insight on social media: Use responsibly.
Communication moves society forward. It unlocks possibilities. Living on the sidelines of the conversation is a wasted life. If anything, this hiatus has crystallized that the best way for me to live life to the fullest is indeed to participate in the conversation, not witness it from afar. After all, it’s much better to be in the parade than to watch it go by.
Glad to be back. Looking forward to catching up with all of you!
Photo credit: Joshua Earle