What would Ted do?
I have decided to walk away from social media.
I’ve been building up to this for some time, and have been putting it off for almost as long. Why? Because I’m a writer, and I want to tell people about my books and articles, and I’ve been persuaded that social media is the way to do that. I’ve been persuaded that as a writer you have to hawk your wares, along with the thousands and thousands of other writers doing the same thing, and that you have to hawk them louder and more imaginatively in order to be heard. I’ve been persuaded that this is just the reality of the ‘media landscape’ these days, that we all have to do it, and that in any case it’s a way of connecting with your readers, sharing stories, exchanging ideas and increasing the sum total of human knowledge.
Except that it doesn’t feel like this To me, it feels cheap and shabby and depressing a lot of the time. I don’t find most of what I read on Twitter or Facebook to be illuminating. Some of it can be, but a lot of it is toxic, or predictable, or infuriating, or depressing, or simply an echo chamber in which people bounce their own opinions off their friends and receive confirmation that they were right all along.
Do writers really need to engage in this? Does it help sell our books? Does it help spread the word about what we do? Perhaps. But does it improve our work, our state of mind, our style, our perspective? I suspect that what we say gets lost in all the white noise, and meanwhile the white noise sinks into our psyches and starts to dissolve them. What could the time we spend on social media be used to do instead? Writing, of course, or reading. But also perhaps spending time with our children, making shelves, chopping logs, visiting friends, listening to music, eating chocolate, or simply staring vacantly at the wall – a much underestimated way of spending the time, in my view.
Personally, I find that when I venture onto Twitter or Facebook for too long, I get agitated, distracted, taken away from my life and my family and my work. I start getting argumentative, and oppositional. I spend too much time looking for excuses not to engage in something more serious or useful. I disappear into my head, and my head begins to buzz with sticky but meaningless bites of information and opinion, much to my detriment and to that of those around me. It brings out the worst in me.
This all sounds very high-minded, I’m sure. I don’t mean it to. I’m not above it. But that’s the point: I want to be above it, or at least away from it, because ultimately I find the whole merry-go-round both frustrating and boring. Ultimately, it makes my life worse, not better, and if the price of stepping back from it is selling a few less books, that’s a price I’ll pay.
When I look around at the people I regard as great contemporary writers, I see that ninety percent of them do not have social media accounts. Thinking about this makes me realise how disappointed I would be if any of them did. If Wendell Berry started tweeting links, or Mary Oliver began sharing petitions on Facebook or Cormac McCarthy began posting pictures of his breakfast, I think my world would end.
Thinking about that made me think in turn about great writers of the past. What would they do today? Could I imagine Ted Hughes or William Golding or Samuel Beckett or Emily Dickinson treating us to their instant opinions on news stories? Perhaps Beckett might have enjoyed the 140 character challenge, but I think he’d be the exception.
Most of my literary heroes would not have been, or are not, seen dead on social media. I’m not comparing the quality of my writing to that of Hughes or Golding – though a man can dream, and aspire – but the point stands. Social media is not social. It is antisocial. It takes time away from your day, it takes attention away from your present, it transforms your mood, it makes you dance to somebody else’s tune. It is idiotic, in the main, and in my view it is helping to make society more idiotic too: shallower, more judgemental, lazier, quicker to offer up soundbites or glib ‘solutions’ to complex problems; less able to concentrate.
I’m not laying down any rules here. This is a purely personal matter. But for me, this stuff makes my life worse, not better, and I don’t want it anymore. I want to be focused on where I am, on the people around me, on the land I work and on the words I’m trying to write and read. That’s more than enough for a life. I don’t need any more facts, any more opinions, any more arguments, any more links. In an age of mass distraction, walking away from all this seems like more than a gesture - it seems like a necessity.
In seven days time, then, I’m closing down my personal Facebook page and my Twitter account. My ‘professional’ Facebook page will remain up for a while, while my website is rebooted. I hope that this will be done in the New Year, and when it is, I will probably close the Facebook page down too, and my website will be the sole repository of my work on the Internet, much to my relief, and doubtless to everyone else’s too.
And with that, I’m going to stop this and go and drink some wine. It’s Friday, after all.