Whenever there’s another discussion about using/leaving social media and whether social media is “good” and why can’t we all just walk away etc I’m always struck by a couple of glaring absences in terms of what’s highlighted.

Firstly, there’s this really common position of “I hate twitter but I need to promote myself/keep myself out there/share my work.”

In this framing social media would be fine so long as you didn’t have to listen to or engage with anyone else.

This seems odd to me, since as a writer what I actually find most “useful” about things like twitter is the incredible ability to sort of immerse myself in a noise of collective thought and expression. It’s a listening platform.

This feels particularly important when so many of the voices one can access via platforms like twitter still don’t really have regular mainstream platforms.

The other thing I note is that too often the much heralded attempt to “give up distraction” or whatever seems doomed to approach the problem from the wrong end. There’s no discussion at all of what we’re trying to distract ourselves *from*.

It seems to me that if you can’t crack that then you can be on social media or not be on social media, it won’t make a blind bit of difference to your general contentment, because the problem lies elsewhere.

So the end result just seems to me to be entirely bad faith. People feel stuck with this thing they don’t like but aren’t really prepared to consider what they do like beyond off-the-peg solutions sold to them by other people: go for a walk, make something etc.

And everyone seems to feel that everything would be easier if everyone else didn’t annoy them so much. Well, yeah. The city would be easier too if no-one ever got in your way.

So I think a deeper question has to be asked: what are the tendencies in our ultimately quite self-centred mode of being which existed before social media and which social media have a tendency to exacerbate?

And by extension: what is the work we need to do in order to manage or dismantle those tendencies, whether social media exists or does not?

It staggers me that an enormous amount of complaining about social media is really just a socially acceptable way of saying you think people are awful, but you need to make and defend space for yourself among all those awful noisy people.

I mean, yeah. That does sound kind of awful.

And of course, if you get *there*, you’re a wide open target for this emerging shadow economy that depends entirely on telling you that all your habits are bad and you need to replace them with things you yourself haven’t chosen.

But that’s still just passive consumption. It’s still just a massive bypassing of the awful question of what void you’re trying to fill and what actually brings you a degree of contentment.

And my god someone close up this loop whereby writers feel they have to be massively online and then write about being massively online and the massively online response to their massively online writing.