Recent thoughts on social media platforms.

I've been seriously considering abandoning all of my social media accounts. The consensus from articles and podcasts tends to say that social media is bad for you, that it makes you unhappy and fills your life with anxiety. I really shouldn't be attached to them, so why keep them?

Then again, what do I do with them? I barely interact with people on them at all. On Twitter, plenty of days go by without a "like" or a "follow;" on Facebook, I refuse to post on my wall unless it's distinctly valuable to my Facebook community, meaning that I haven't posted for months; on Tumblr, I don't interact with anybody at all. The most interaction I have with anybody is on Instagram, but even that is pretty minimal. And the others are all tertiary.

So why keep them? Why maintain all these sites when I'm barely social on them? I haven't posted any new music for a few years, so why maintain those sites? And the other, the ones I've joined if only to monopolize my jeffnords URLs, do they really mean anything to me?

There are a couple practical reasons to keep them: for one, each of the sites function as a link repository. When I find something online I want to make reference to, I can post them with a comment and that helps me remember where they are. There's embedding: each of these sites let me embed things into this blog, for example; and then there's communication, since Messenger is one of the only ways I'm talking with my kids these days. So I can't really just throw them away.. or at least I can't get rid of Google and Facebook, since they're the sites that I use to sign in to numerous other sites.

So it's got me thinking: all these places say people should get off social media if they want to be happy, but I think the evidence is in that social media isn't the problem. 

But there's the phone. I never wanted a cell phone. I remember when I let my partner talk me into getting one. I really didn't want it. I didn't want to be contactable all the time. I was happy with my landline. I also reluctantly signed up for Facebook. These were things that simply weren't natural to me. 

But for the reasons I already mentioned, I can't quite get rid of them now. Even if I remove the apps from my phone, I can easily access each of those platforms through the phone's browser.

Could I scrap the smartphone? Probably not. A friend of mine tried to simplify his life and start using a simple non-smart mobile phone, but he found the quality so discouraging that he re-upgraded to a smartphone. I imagine I'd do the same thing if I tried. 

And Pokemon GO is still a guilty pleasure. And might be ruining my thinking more than anything else.