I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Monday Marketing, I research, plan, and evaluate my marketing and promotion activities.
Lately I’ve felt more and more reluctant to participate on social media, despite its seeming importance if I want to get some sort of content creation / writing / advisory business off the ground. I have accounts on Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, Reddit, and Bluesky but only lightly use each of them. Every time I do, I feel unpleasantly exposed.
I consider Substack a little different, as I use it mainly to host and send my newsletter articles.
Nicholas Carr’s new book Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart argues that social media is hurting us more than helping us. In a recent interview, Carr said:
When social media first started to emerge in the early years of the 21st century, there was this sense that simply by allowing people to communicate more, speed up the exchange of messages, enlarge the volume of messages, and expand the network of connections, it would have beneficial effects. If communication in general is good, then the assumption was more communication must be better.
I argue in the book that this turned out to be a misperception on a very large scale, because it’s not true that more efficient communication is necessarily better communication. In fact, what we’ve seen is that when people have to handle extreme levels of messaging, going back and forth with lots more people simultaneously, it overwhelms their ability to be thoughtful, build empathy, or understand one another. Instead of building understanding and greater trust, it ends up creating misunderstanding and mistrust. And it triggers psychological reactions that are actually antisocial rather than prosocial.
Since I’ve lately been pulling back on my plans to launch a podcast around personal finance, retirement, and work topics for Gen X in order to focus only on writing, I’m wondering if I can as well pull back on social media. While my participation has been extremely spotty, it’s still something that weighs upon me.
Perhaps part of what I’m feeling is too much disclosure. Carr says that in the real world, we disclose more deliberately and slowly than online:
This was one of the most interesting threads of research I found. As relationships deepen in the real world, they’re much more balanced around disclosure and maintaining privacy. Meeting someone in person, you wouldn’t pull out a photo album and start showing them everything you’ve been doing. You don’t immediately tell someone your political views or everything about you, like you would on Facebook or Instagram. You’re very deliberate in disclosing things. And, because the person’s right there, you can read their expressions, their non-verbal communication, to help you figure out how far along you are in your friendship and whether you can get a little deeper and more personal.
I’ve found that my disclosures on social media brought me into closer connection with certain people, in general they made me feel self-conscious and unfiltered.
I workshopped this problem with ChatGPT. “Workshop” is something my daughter has taken to calling what she does with ChatGPT when she’s working through something. I like that a lot, as it indicates that she’s in charge, not the AI, and that it’s a process, not an ask-a-question-and-get-an-answer one and done.
ChatGPT suggested using my website as my home base, as an ongoing memoir, “curated but not performative.” This is essentially what I’ve been doing recently. I link to my recent articles, share new paintings, and publish daily(-ish) blog posts. Another suggestion was to treat my Substack as a “studio” or “salon,” “a place where all your art, writing, and thoughts converge, even if loosely themed.”
As part of this evolution, I may refrain from posting anything to my LinkedIn, Instagram, and Twitter accounts. I may start looking to promote my work in mass media fashion rather than to people I already know in some fashion (e.g., they are LinkedIn connections). That is sort of an interesting possible direction: don’t rely on social media and online friends but rather go towards mass promotion. I wonder what that might look like? Something to workshop with ChatGPT!