Why I'm not on social media much
What I want to say is too important to me to be posted there
In the beginning, I thought that maybe my 15 minutes of fame would be brought about by my timely and witty social media bons mots, and I did play in that world for a bit. But when it became clear that Facebook would fill mostly with spite and garbage (in addition to just so much noise), I closed my account. That was in 2012.
I have a Twitter account which I use to watch a few things and people dear to my heart, but I almost never post. I am of two minds: That no one is much interested in my trivial blather, and that my less-trivial blather is worth more than a fleeting post, rapidly dropping beneath the event horizon. Immortality is asking a lot, but more than trivial engagement shouldn’t be that hard.
Most of all, though, I’m horrified by the idea that my algorithmically-exploited digital twin would represent me to the rest of the world without my consent or knowledge. At least mattkolon.com is mine, and while it’s free for anyone to read or ignore, I can control what it says about me. I don’t suffer from a need to be seen. I have been in positions and situations like that before, and I prefer to manage them more closely than the viral world allows.
I’m worried about the extent to which we all watch each other now, and while I’m probably not as concerned about government surveillance as I should be, it seems in the end we all make sure Big Brother and everyone else has plenty to watch. I have always found Keith Lowell Jensen compelling: “What Orwell failed to predict is that we’d buy the cameras ourselves, and that our biggest fear would be that nobody was watching.”
This doesn’t seem healthy to me. It requires a preoccupation with yourself, with being performative, of always thinking of what your next act will be. The whole game is about continually working your needle to the top of the haystack, which I find exhausting. Most of us are posting to a small group of friends, hoping our extended group links to an influencer who will boost our post (and maybe us) into the stratosphere, where the real money is.
But there is seldom money there, nor any reward other than the lottery-like chances of fame, as likely for the wrong reasons as the right ones. So I’ll keep linking people to my little bits of interest here and wherever else I put them, but only on platforms I control, at least in part.