Infoglut & Social Media Overload

Last week I took a break from Facebook. 

I found myself becoming overly obsessed with the amount of likes each of these posts were getting. Then, I found myself being triggered over and over again. I figured that it was time to cut my loses and deactivate for the first time since I opened my account in 2004.

This is how we live now. It's the way we connect with each other, both people that we have no business staying connected to (elementary school pen pal) and people we need to stay connected to (mom). I've taken several social media breaks (which I jokingly referred to as "cleanses") in the past for days at a time. But this was the first time I left Facebook entirely and let me tell you it felt weird.

I switched the Facebook energy to Twitter and was instantly WAY more informed on a bunch of things. I was reminded that Facebook is limited in so many ways and I had been relying on it for things it was never meant to do. It was nice to be in a space with a little less, less characters, less pictures, less everything. Twitter is how I found out about the protest Saturday and where I went to watch it all unfold in real time. Note: this is not a Facebook vs. Twitter post even though it's kind of starting to sound like one.

We are surrounded by so much stuff, information, opinions, images, facts and figures. I can only describe it as "noise." In therapy I've been working on listening to my own voice and trusting that. Let me tell you, in the current social media landscape that is VERY difficult to do. For those of us that have trouble finding out voice it's a hard task to be bombarded by other people's thoughts and feelings before we have fully figured out our own. Not to mention the consequences of how those thoughts and feelings if shared will be received by our network.

I'm so grateful for the space social media has created for me. I'm able to stay connected to people I love and people who's opinions and work I respect. I'm able to stay up to date on the latest news and information. But with that comes a kind of exhaustion, reading word after word starts to feel like sitting in a room where people are screaming things at you "I liked this movie!" "My baby walked today!" "The country is shit!" Individually these things aren't bad, it's nice to see a baby walk for the first time or feel validated in one's worries about the state of things. But when you mesh them all together in a feed with pictures and ads and doodads it's pretty mind numbing.

I'm back on Facebook now but I'm also trying to stay on Twitter because I remembered how much I enjoyed it. Add Instagram and the occasional Snapchat peruse and I'm back where I started. There's no handbook for this. No handbook for figuring out the uncharted waters of the emotional impact of information at our fingertips. For now I'll just continue to check in with myself and take breaks when I need them, deactivate if I feel like it and get totally sucked into my phone if I feel like it.

In this political moment I'll take more breaks and add to the conversation even if I don't get the likes I wanted.