Blessing or Curse. A Look at Social Media.

Like most of us, I have a love/hate relationship with social media. As a published author, I am expected to have several accounts, depending on my target audience. To be seen, the algorithms demand that I not only post regularly – at least once, if not more a day – I also need to interact with other people’s posts to grow my audience and bring my profile to the public eye.

That in itself is exhausting.

I don’t have a pet. I hate to cook. I rarely watch the news. I am a fairly private person, so my life is not an open book for others to read. Apart from my novels, I have nothing to sell. I dislike arguments, so would probably never post anything controversial or inflammatory. I value the privacy of my friends and family. I would never air my dirty laundry in the public domain. So, what on earth am I supposed to titillate my followers with?

I don’t have the time to mess about thinking up content every day. I have more important things to do – like write! Neither do I believe that my 352 Facebook followers will somehow translate to book sales. I would go even further and say, I don’t believe social media can sell my books, unless I pay the billionaire owners even more money to advertise and tip the balance of viewing in my favour. Which I refuse to do.

I recently joined LinkedIn as several people had said it was worth creating an account. According to their stats, my profile has been looked at numerous times, my posts are reaching a fairly good audience, in my opinion, and I have had many people wanting to connect with me. However, they don’t want to engage in meaningful conversation, or ask me about my work. As soon as I accept their request, I am immediately bombarded with messages selling me goods and services that I have never asked for.

My interest in it is waning fast.

I opened a Twitter account a couple of years ago, but I could never get to grips with it. When I bothered scrolling down the feed there was never anything interesting on there. My own input faded to only publishing my blog posts, and that was because it was automatically generated by my website.  Meaningful connections never materialised and, since Elon Musk’s takeover, I have become very disillusioned with X. Today, I deactivated my account. I shan’t miss it one bit.

Other alternative sites seem to be popping up all over the place. Threads. Bluesky. Booktok. Mastadon. It’s hard to keep track of the current trends. But why should we? If we find somewhere that is comfortable and does what we need, why go anywhere else?

So, what does social media give us?

First, it gives us connections. Not in some networking, career enhancing way, but in reaching out to fellow human beings and offering a hand of friendship. Many of my Facebook followers on my author page are already known to me, but I have quite a few that have joined because I have commented on their posts, offered advice and information, or appreciated their jokes. I have made some lovely friends, and my feed is populated with encouraging, helpful, fun posts that means scrolling is never a chore.

I have also found old schoolfriends, cousins, and friends that had become nothing more than a fond memory through Facebook. We may never meet face to face, but I enjoy sharing small parts of their lives with them.

Secondly, it is useful for the dissemination of information. I have been made aware of resources, conferences and seminars, useful websites, and links to pages that help me with my writing or answer a question I might have posed. With millions of possible pages to land on, it’s good to be given something directly rather than trawling through mounds of rubbish to find the elusive pot of gold.

As I mentioned previously, I rarely listen to the news. I find it generates fear and is very depressing. However, there are some news items that I should be looking at, if only to pray over a situation or intercede for a person. I may get alerted by social media, but, like Wikipedia, I would rather visit other sites to verify (or more often counter) the clickbait headlines and inflammatory posts.

Unfortunately, many people are not as discerning. You only have to see the outrage expressed by many at the false and misleading posts of recent weeks. Whether it’s a gender argument fuelled by the Olympics or right-wing riots ignited by a non-existent immigrant’s sins, there are too many people ready to rant over the least provocation. Calls for social media sites to police their platforms are useless. The issue has grown too large to control without curtailing freedom of speech or heading too far down the route of censorship.

For me, Facebook also gives me a good laugh. Because of the way the algorithms work, when you interact with a post, Facebook will show you more just like it. This can work negatively by reinforcing views and opinions that are aligned to your own, to the point that you never see another POV. However, in my case, I get a regular diet of memes which cause me to laugh out loud. As a Star Trek fan, I am particularly addicted to Riker’s Beard! Bad dad jokes with the droll face of Jean-Luc Picard seem to be a perfect combination for my sense of humour.

Like any tool, social media can be a force for good or a catalyst for evil. Whatever people may think of it, it is here to stay. We need to get to grips with it ourselves instead of waiting for faceless governments to legislate, or multi-millionaires to instigate change.

Ask yourself, why are you on these platforms? What do you want from social media? Can it actually give you what you want? How much time are you willing to set aside for it?

You may find that, like me, it is not anything like as important as we have been repeatedly told.