An Apology to Social Media from a Recluse

I would like to thank anyone who is part of my social network for your patience with me.  Over the years, much has been made of the benefits of the internet for shy people.   But I’m just not seeing it.  I acknowledge there must be truth to these benefits for many, but for me, logging into Facebook “feels” exactly the same as walking into a cocktail party and being expected to gracefully mingle – that is, nearly impossible.    

I do care about others’ lives and aspirations.  I am interested.  I appreciate invitations and likes, and so on.  But I find myself overwhelmed by it all, and am limited to the occasional status update.   It takes a gargantuan effort for me to log in, and once I’m there, I’m the proverbial deer in headlights.    

My absence from social media for several years can also be partially explained by the fact that I was waiting for a better version of myself to develop and take over – one that would dazzle and impress.  One never did, so I’d best go with what I have.

This is perhaps similar to the phenomenon of being in your twenties and looking forward to the fabulous future that surely will arrive fully formed beyond the next horizon.  From what I can tell, for some people, this realization and consummation and actualization happens.  But for most of us leading lives of quiet desperation, we content ourselves with inebriation and consolidation.  The mid to late thirties are about, if not scaling back, putting bets on our best horses.  Ruthless decisions are made.  Mortality now awaits.  This is the time to look it dead on – or else perish early because your courage fails.

Does this sound extreme?  I don’t know.  To me, it just sounds like daily life.  Then again, as with the questionably-calibrated amp in Spinal Tap, I go to 11.  I don’t really have any lower, less intense settings – perhaps another reason social media stymies me. 

Some become angry with me, I know, for dwelling on my own experiences and emotions – everyone feels alone or isolated or awkward, they object.  For the record, yes, I know that.  In fact, I wouldn’t write about myself if I didn’t.  At the risk of sounding self-absorbed, I write from my own perspective about things because I find it too presumptuous on my part to think that I know precisely what the insides of others’ heads and lives look like – whereas I do know my own intimately.  From there, I always just hope that maybe something I say is relatable or hateable or, even better, odd or funny.  So yes, the only reason I write is because I know we all share loneliness at times.

I’ve also lived long enough that I know there are different degrees to these things.  It’s all relative.  I’ve heard people talk proudly and honestly of rarely having felt a moment of social awkwardness or loneliness in their entire lives. That extreme does therefore exist, and so does the other extreme.  Most of us fall, of course, somewhere in the middle.   Even in a single lifetime, we are many versions of ourselves, sometimes to the degree that we are like different people in different lifetimes.  Some versions of myself have experienced greater degrees of connection than others, and so by comparison, I recognize the times in my life during which I am particularly lonely.  But whatever the exact circumstances, most people have the occasional instance of feeling alone – and somehow the increased interaction (and styles of interaction) of the modern world can have the opposite effect of actually making us feel more alone. 

I’ve been told that it has become increasingly popular in recent years to bash or reject social media, but that doesn’t seem prudent to me.  Social media has both advantages and disadvantages – as does every other mode of communication throughout the history of time and space.  I always threaten my students with twenty lashes with a wet noodle if their papers contain even one sentence, thesis statement or not, that claims, “There are both advantages (pros, positives, upsides) and disadvantages (cons, negatives, downsides) to… [blank].”  Never has there been an emptier, more senseless statement than that one. (Well, except for the one that claims, “[Blank] and [blank] have both similarities and differences.”)

Within the past few years I briefly dated a man who condemned Facebook and all social media altogether.  Over dinner I made the rather inane and innocuous comment that it was, you know, fairly smart stuff.  No, Facebook was not a brilliant concept, he insisted.  Rather, it was utter stupidity, and every single person involved in social media is an idiot.  (A bit of a sweeping pronouncement, in my opinion, and part of the reason we did not go on more dates.)  This man also did not own a cell phone, and had no intentions of ever getting one.  When we met up, this made finding him quite the challenge.  (I don’t even remember: before cell phones, how did we ever find each other?  We must have done it through sheer determination and cunning and using our eyesight or something.)  I admit that I don’t quite understand what might be so wrong with owning a cell phone just to send the occasional harmless text: “Just pulled in at the restaurant.”

I don’t know.  But that’s the example of being a total luddite, and it must be respected.

If this man had a fear of cell phones or social media in general turning into offensive distractions from more “meaningful” contact, I alone am proof of the fact that simply owning particular devices does not cause this to happen.  I know how to send a text, but it’s very rare that I do, except to accomplish a particular purpose.  Also, I am of a generation and a temperament that I prefer certain etiquette to be followed, so for example, I make a rule of never so much as glancing at any kind of media if I am with a friend or family member in person.  I insist that my students show this kind of courtesy with their own devices while in a classroom (though of course a large number ignore me and/or roll their eyes).  I feel passionately about the power and value of community, of “face time,” and of placing quality focus on one thing at a time without too many distractions at hand.  Perhaps, then, the words for me are “scrupulously sentimental and old-fashioned.” 

In any case, simply owning a cell phone did not “corrupt” me, if one wants to see it that way.  And the reason I’ve never owned a smart phone is not through any sort of strenuous moral objection, but for the very dull reason that I can’t afford one.  I’d love to be able to move fully into the 21st century, but the 21st century is expensive.

It’s perhaps worth adding the observation that we know social media has the potential to be destructive, or even lethal – that individuals have committed suicide based on the ability of social media to overwhelm with a sense of (negative) comparison with others, and with feelings of inferiority and hopelessness.  If my erstwhile date sensed the dangerous undercurrent in social media, that aspect can’t be denied, and that undercurrent is as real to me as to anyone. 

But at its best, to put it very generically, social media is a valuable tool.  I’d give anything to be able to do it “right,” and I do feel I owe a kind of apology for being unable to “fit in” and actively participate.  In truth, we’re all just the same old people in different times and circumstances.  I felt exactly the same way in grade school as I do now – especially in phys ed when we played kickball and I didn’t even understand what base to run to. I also felt the same way back in kindergarten when I couldn’t explain why I was upset about being forced to take part in making a communal vegetable stew. 

I am not even remotely an antisocial creature.  I live to secure quality one-on-one time.  But we don’t live in a one-on-one world anymore.  One-on-one time takes, well, time – time that people don’t have anymore.  It also takes a particular form of focus and concentration that appears to be on the wane currently in our culture.

Or maybe there are just too many of us now – too many people in this world, that is.  Too much competition.  Perhaps I just fail to win the attention of another, while others do. 

My best modes of communication are hopelessly old fuddy-duddy – I love intimate conversations and long letters, which has been replaced by the long email (…except, that’s not really a thing, either).  I miss the idea that communication is special and exclusive, meant only to happen between two people.  It puts me into a hopelessly bad mood that it isn’t.  I recently saw it observed (probably in Entertainment Weekly) that the epistolary novel is virtually extinct because people don’t write letters anymore.  The epistolary novel has never been my favorite genre, but somehow this still seems significant and even alarming – that we communicate so little with each other in meaningful written verbal depth that we can’t even have a genre based on it any longer. That scares me.  I don’t know.  Maybe it doesn’t scare anyone else.

I create giant wordscapes in a number of different contexts.  It’s what I do.  What I was born to do.  And it’s really the only thing I do with any degree of real competence.  But in the super-visual, low-attention-span modern world – a world also of the quick and disposable status update or text message – I was apparently born in the wrong place and time.

Maybe one trouble for me is that I think almost entirely in essays.  That’s where my consciousness resides; it’s pretty much my only mode of being, other than fiction.  So if I’m in the fantasy part of my head, I’m in the Last-Lorns, and if I’m momentarily in the real world, I’m here in essays.  When I’m vacuuming, driving, on the elliptical trainer, thoughts passing through my head, I don’t really have anything like single, isolated thoughts – my mind, even at rest, collects thoughts and attaches them into structures that translate most naturally into the form we call “essay.” 

Problematically, if I try to write a personal email, rather than producing any sort of suitable “social” form, I find that my mode of thought translates into something very much like an essay.  The style of it is way too formal in an extremely informal world.  My style is too formal even for blogging, which is a tad discouraging. 

As for the notion of the long email (as a modern stand-in for the long letter), I find that even if one does indulge in writing them, they rarely accomplish anything, precisely because there is no context for them any longer.  I won’t go so far as to say that writing in this way *never* accomplishes anything, because I have had several lasting and very meaningful exchanges with particular individuals during my lifetime.  But for the most part, the trouble is that the long email/letter is a deeply considered and time-consuming means of communication for the person producing it that most people on the receiving end now treat as being disposable and quick “junk,” as if the effort put into it were nothing more grueling than a three-second status update.  I am not in any way trying to condemn these recipients. The truth is, these long forms are just the wrong modality for what most people are trying to accomplish these days, and I observe that by using them, I am committing an unfair action by preventing people from having any sort of next move.

A main reason for the extinction of long written communication is that it once had the purpose of defeating distance – a long, detailed letter was the closest stand-in for a personal visit.  That distance has been collapsed in the modern world.  Because of transportation and phones and especially the internet, distance no longer even exists.  That’s righteous and mind-blowing.  But for some people, the distance still exists anyway.  Distance is not just literal and physical.  That’s why I’ve been dispatching tales from the remote Last-Lorns since 1976.   

In the main, I have resolved to quit writing long emails and write here instead, which will be easier on everyone I have ever known or ever will know.  (This amounts to writing letters to everyone – which perhaps equates to writing letters to no one.)  Now, I will not of course do it right; I can’t help noticing that there are limitless purportedly helpful articles about how to blog correctly.  But of course I will not be doing it “right,” or even attempting to do it “right” – whatever that’s even supposed to mean.

What makes the most sense (at least as I see it) is to cease trying to exist on any kind of personal level, and exist only on a “public” level instead, even though that’s against my nature, and even if I don’t do it “correctly” here either.  For the most part, I don’t really have a personal existence, anyway; writing has always been the only place where anything I have that is like a “self” exists. Also, in some strange way, if I do manage to say anything wrong and offensive, it is better to do it publicly than privately.  In a way, having a blog is a way that I can protect and honor people who have been close to me or kind to me.

I have always been a bizarre mix of an absolute open book and a very reserved person.  On Facebook, for example, I often don’t particularly want other people to know what I “like,” in terms of films, products, etc.  In some cases, it’s because I’m rather embarrassed about most of what I “like.”  I really don’t care to share.  And yet here, in this format, I will share everything I’ve got inside me and will never pull any punches. I have to be completely raw and bare, or nothing at all. 

So, if anyone wants me, you know where to find me – here.  Apparently this is where I now exist.  It’s a strange world where an extremely private person can exist only as an entirely public persona – or else doesn’t exist at all.