By Kerry Schafer
Social Media is a wonderful thing. It allows us to connect with others of like mind who live at a distance. It can foster creativity, spur us on to reach our goals, provide both education and entertainment.
It’s also chock full of emotional land mines.
The infamous Facebook experiment is a case in point. If you managed to miss the news on this one, Facebook deliberately controlled the positive and negative posts on the feeds of some randomly selected users for a week, as an experiment. This is what happened:
“The researchers found that moods were contagious. The people who saw more positive posts responded by writing more positive posts. Similarly, seeing more negative content prompted the viewers to be more negative in their own posts.”
You can read more about it here if you wish.
Really, the results of this experiment aren’t surprising. For some reason, we seem to forget that the Internet isn’t artificial intelligence. It’s created by human beings. And social media, in whatever form, is human beings – the good, the bad, and the ugly.
Most of us are pretty aware that if we’re hanging out with negative, toxic people we’re going to feel the emotional effects of that. If we hang out with supportive, enthusiastic people we’re likely to feel better. But for some reason we’re surprised that social media can influence our emotions.
And what influences our emotions is going to have an impact on our writing. Maybe it will inspire us, lift us up, increase our creative flow and help us be better writers. Or, maybe, it will make us feel depressed, hopeless, jealous, and all of those other negative things that get between us and our keyboards.
The good news is that it’s much easier to control Social Media than the social aspects of our real life worlds. If you’ve got a co-worker who perpetually rubs your fur the wrong way and makes you wish you could flame like a dragon, chances are you’re just going to have to deal with that unless you want to find another job. And family members, unless they are so toxic that you need to take the radical step of severing ties, are there for life.
But social media is a different story. Some virtual friends really are friends in all the ways that matter. But be honest now – how many people on your Twitter and Facebook feeds are you truly connected to? If there is somebody who makes you feel sad, angry, disturbed, or even uncomfortable, is that a person you really need to have in your virtual world?
Most of us don’t want to hurt anybody. And we worry about how somebody will feel if we cut them out. I’m not advocating suddenly unfriending somebody you’ve been virtual friends with for years just because they’re going through a bad patch. But that person on your Twitter feed that you never talk to who is irritating you? I believe that any reasonably adjusted adult will be able to weather an unfriending from a stranger.
You have the control. Mute, unfriend, block, whatever you need to do. Life throws enough ugly our way that we have to deal with. What good is served by wading through irritation and negativity when we don’t have to? If you are of the persuasion that you want ALL the followers on the chance that maybe some of them will buy your book, you don’t have to look at all of their posts. Use Tweetdeck or another app and make lists of the people you do want to see every day.
Even if you carefully control your online environment to include only the people you choose to have in your world, there are still going to be hard times. Because, again, we’re all human beings. Every one of us is going to have bad days. We’re going to rant. People and pets are going to die. Jobs will be lost. Agents will turn out to be a bad idea, book contracts will go sour. Bad things will happen. Really good things will happen too, and some days it can start to seem like every writer in the world is luckier than you.
And I want to make it clear that I think posting about these things is good and important. I love my online support community and I’m not in any way saying we should try to create a sterile climate that’s all sunshine and lollypops.
It’s important to support and be supported, to engage in the give and take that makes us compassionate human beings. But there will be days where all of this is just too much. Maybe you have your own grief and just can’t shoulder anybody else’s right now. Or maybe you’re in despair about your own writing and watching a bunch of other writers shouting with glee about the new agent, the new contract, the award nomination, the bestseller ranking or even their latest soaring word count makes you want to take to the streets with a bottle in a brown paper wrapper.
Sometimes a media vacation is in order. It’s okay to step away from the internet. We also have control over this with the click of a mouse. If you spend a lot of time online a day or two away might seem daunting at first. You’ll be afraid you’re going to miss something. And you will, but nothing earth shattering. Anybody really important in your world will know how to find you.
Or, if you really feel the need to check your feeds every day, consider writing before you log on. Meditate first. Journal first. Pet the dog, go for a run, listen to music. Do something to set your mind and your mood before letting all of the other outside influences in.
Experiment and find out what works for you. The best part of the whole social media experience is that you have the control.
You are so right, Kerry. I know people who actually monitor unfollows or unfriends and get all upset when it happens. I honestly do not obsess about that because in the big scheme of things, it doesn’t matter.
But periodically I go to the site that replaced “justunfollow.com” (can’t remember the new name) and get rid of Twitter follows who haven’t posted in months or who don’t follow me….so that I can add other new friends who are more active. And on Facebook, I tend to hide updates of folks who spend most of their time ranting about politics. As you said, we’re in control and we can take a social media break anytime we feel like it.