Reasons I Avoid Social Media

I do not use any of the most popular forms of social media.  I am not on Facebook.  I have never received a “tweet.”  I had to learn to send text messages on a trip to Mexico last year when that was the only means of communication available… but the number of texts I send in the course of a year can be counted on my fingers.

I admit that I have an account on LinkedIn, a professional networking site, which I access a few times each year to see where old friends are and what they are doing.  And, YES, I realize this is a blog, which is a form of social media.  But Gryphem  is about civic issues, social and philosophical opinions, historical comments, and observations about life.  It’s not about my personal life.  In my mind, the Gryphem blog is less social media than an electronic newspaper column.

Courtesy epic.co.uk



So why don’t I utilize the more trendy forms of social media?  Well, it is probably rooted in the same mindset that kept me from having an email account until 1999 when I was sent overseas where there were no available telephones, that kept me from buying a computer until 2001, that kept me from having a cell phone until 2004 when my employer handed me one and said, “Keep it turned on.”  But it’s more than my underlying technophobia.  Here are a few reasons I do not choose to participate in social media activities.

My first reason for declining to participate is identity theft, and the closely-related issue of privacy.  If an identity thief gets enough information from my electronic interactions, my credit and finances might be destroyed in a day.  Similarly, if people I know or work with learn things that shouldn’t be public knowledge, the results might be embarrassing or detrimental to my career.  I know that anything I put on line can never be fully recaptured.  Trying to undo an unwise publication, whether an impolite comment or an indiscrete photo, would be like trying to put the toothpaste back into the tube.  It just isn’t going to happen.  I choose to protect my identity, my privacy, and my dignity by not making everything about my personal life available in a public forum.

I choose not to participate in social networking because of my essential belief that, when possible, human beings should relate to one another through personal contact rather than technology.  I want to be there in person with those I care about... talk to them... look them in the eye.  I believe that people should interact in person when possible, with voice contact when necessary, or at the very least through one-on-one written correspondence. 

Electronic communication works well for transmission of strictly factual information, but it is not effective for human-to-human interaction.  Electronic communication is always incomplete.  Our human communication is much more than the words we speak.  Without physical presence we miss out on eye contact, vocal inflection, body language and intuitive non-verbal messages.  When we are not present, not seeing or hearing the voice of the other, we are apt to miss important parts of their message.  Or worse yet, we may read into their words implications that were never really there, making erroneous assumptions and hearing a message that is more about our own preconceptions than their actual intended message. 

Social media entice us, by means of easy availability, to communicate digitally rather than personally.  I believe it is not normal to communicate with bits and bytes when I might just as easily speak in person. 

Social media tempt people to ignore the friends and family who are present in order to interact via electronic means, whether phone or text or IM or web page, with others who are elsewhere.  I want to BE PRESENT wherever I am.  Social media present me with the danger of becoming so spread-out that I am not really present anywhere.

Social media are essentially impersonal.  A post on Facebook or a tweet to followers is a communiqué intended for a group, not an individual.  I would rather not interact with my friends and family as one within a large group of followers.  I prefer personal communication, not news releases.  If you are now objecting that posts and tweets do not have to be impersonal, then I direct your attention back to the paragraph about privacy. 

"Narcissistic Bathers"
by Jack Vettriano

It seems to me that social networking may – in some cases - contribute to a narcissistic mindset.  If I am constantly broadcasting every little thought or event in my life, then I will eventually give in to the illusion that there is an adoring public out there just waiting to hear what’s next with me.  The fact is, most people are less concerned about posts and texts and tweets – whoever they come from - than with what they’re going to say or do next themselves.  A wise man once told me this:  “You would worry a lot less about what people think about you if you realized how little they do.”  That may be depressing to some, but it rings true.  We all have individual concerns that are very important to us, but those concerns usually are not shared by everyone in our social network. 

Some people argue stringently that use of social media by organizations leads to a more informed workforce, and empowers all the members of the organization.  I agree to a point.  Websites and blogs can be effective for those purposes.  I’m not so sure about other social networking, though.  In my experience, organizationally-sponsored social networking tends to divert members from their primary duties as they focus on the popular concerns of the day.  They also tend to provide ready-made short-circuits to the normal organizational communication structures and established means of operation.  Of course, for all I know, all those things might be positive developments.

I believe that social networking is basically myopic.  If I use it too much, I am likely to get so focused on the concerns I constantly post and tweet, or that my on line contacts post and tweet, that I lose touch with the “big picture,” and forget what’s really important.  If I use social media too much, it might be like putting on social or professional or emotional blinders. 

Here’s one more reason I do not get too involved in the world of social media:  I just don’t care what that guy I met once, five years ago, is having for dinner.  I just don’t care about the problem that friend-of-a-friend is having with her neighbor’s cat.  I just don’t care what that electronic screen name that I’ve never met thinks about his boss.  Information overload is already a problem, and I don’t need to make it worse by involving myself in the electronic minutia of other people’s lives. 

I do care about people.  I really do.  It is because I care about people that I cannot spend my life’s time and energy focusing on small concerns or irrelevant details in the lives of people I don’t really know.  I am too busy with my very real life.  If the issues are big and real, if the people involved are very important to me, then that is another matter.  But on social networks that is not usually the situation.  If you want to be my real-world friend, I welcome that.  I am ready to get to know you.  I will learn to value you personally and to relate to you as a friend.  But if you only want to interact on line, about details of your life that don’t affect me in the slightest, then I must respectfully decline.

That’s why I don’t use social networking.  Of course, a couple of real-world people whose opinions I value tell me that the only way I will expand readership of the Gryphem blog is to get a Facebook page.  So I guess I will do that. 

Never mind.

Gryphem