Social Media and Sanity

I read an article recently that looked at the ways social media can distance us from the tangible things in life. How the distractions of ‘friending’, ‘un-friending’, and arguing ad nauseum with strangers online can chip away at the real and beautiful things in life: our relationships, the sound of the wind against the windows, that first cup of coffee in the silence of a new day. The author’s words are coming back to me today. For the first time, I’ve ‘un-friended’ someone on facebook that I know, that I haven’t ‘just fallen out of touch with’. I did it because her updates became something completely other than what I wanted my online experience to be.

I don’t go on social media to push an agenda, to argue forever about politics and religion. I don’t want my time online to take me away from those I love or to hover in my mind throughout the day and getting between me and the real moments in life. That doesn’t mean I want to agree with everyone, it does mean I want to continue to respect everyone I chose to interact with though. And I want to be treated with respect by them as well.

I pursue this attitude toward media imperfectly, but intentionally, by:

~ Only friending people on Facebook that I’ve either met in person, or in a few exceptions (Jenna! Christie!) people I feel I know well enough and want desperately to meet in person. This is because I do consider my account to be like a giant party, and I’d rather invite the people I trust to visit me there and watch my life lived out in pictures and snatches of conversation.

~ Only being Facebook friends with people I am actually on friendly terms with. That way I avoid the temptation to excessive voyeurism and avoid arguing with people who’s feelings I don’t care to protect.

~ Avoiding toxic relationships. Obviously this is just as applicable to the real-world, but I think, for me at least, it’s easier to allow a toxic relationship to grow and fester online, because you can just turn off the computer..and then turn it back on again five minutes later..and then talk about it for hours with your husband while the dog takes advantage of your distraction..

What do you do to keep your online social life sane?

Mondays

The sun is autumn-bright, pine-needles make the path to the outhouse slippery for the tiny moccasined feet that follow me out and back again. I’m planning black coffee and fig-jam filled pancakes for tea and cleaning up the messy that’s collected this past week. Petka is napping. I spent the morning prioritizing my nap time activities - the poem I’m trying to finish for this, the article I’m working on for that, pilates and letters and here I am, posting a blog - which is actually on the list, but lower down, because Yarrow doesn’t make blogging impossible so much as she slows it down. I could use a lesson or two from her. She likes things to be slow and peaceful, my little elf. She likes the long days at home, and the hour long strolls up and down the driveway, stopping to pick up a stone, a leaf, a stick; stopping to write out her magic in the dirt and laugh up at the sky. She likes the days with no visitors, and she likes to watch her bushia’s truck pull up in the yard, wave and smile.

    Jenna is taking the week off, to do the things in life that pile up when priority goes to the computer, our discussion will return again next week. There’s no rush, we have time. I might do the same, spend this week mainly off-line, canning apples and making jams, putting the gardens to bed and stacking wood. Finishing poems. Sewing. Reading Each Peach, Pear, Plum again and again to the girl who enjoys repetition almost as much as her beloved Baby Jesus. But if I can, I’ll wake up early to post things and enjoy the wider world. It will be my gift to myself for learning again to love the dark autumn morning.

Ways and Means

This week we’re going to continue discussion technology and it’s effect on writing with another of Jenna’s suggestions. I tend to write my drafts with a pen. Ideally a very nice, black pen, able to make a nice, dark line on the paper. I don’t generally like lined paper, except in journaling, and hate writing in pencil. I used to type my edited poems on the typewriter, but mine is having trouble now, so I tend to just rewrite. I love handwritten drafts. The look, the feel, the scent, and all the crossed out bits that I can rediscover later and edit back in. A computer doesn’t allow me to have the crossed out sections, so when I write on the computer I tend to delete whole pages in a fit of simplification only to discover later that I really wanted one partially remembered bit back. Those are my reasons for writing by hand. But do I think it has an impact on the final product, in general, not for me specifically? I don’t know, I think it must, but I wouldn’t go so far to say the impact is good or bad. I can’t usually tell the difference between a typewritten or handwritten final draft. The impact is less on the outcome than the process. I think typing everything on the computer leads to a more transitory relationship to the words themselves, they are so easily deleted, they haven’t ‘bled’ on the page the way written words do, but that impermanence gives the writer more freedom while editing to completely transform the piece.

 

I do wonder, in my more judgmental moments, whether writing solely on the computer has contributed to the huge number of badly written, barely edited books coming out on the market. I know I edit less when I see my writing on a screen instead of a page, and I know that the ability to put so much done, so quickly, with no fear of running out of space has encouraged me to over-write at times. But I don’t know how much of this is due to my own personal weaknesses as a writer and how much is due to the influence of technology. I’m interested to see the response here, because I don’t have a set opinion, so much as a collection of muddled feelings and impressions.

What do you think? Do we need to reclaim the written word, abandon our computers and return to a place without screens and humming monitors? I don’t think so, but I would argue for keeping the texture of writing alive in some way, in typewriters, inky pens, and coffee stained pages that can be finalized on the computer, but have lived in some way without it.