My social media blackout

Update: I learned very little from my social media blackout. But I did learn one very important thing.

There are a lot of interesting things to share that are hard for me to write about, but that might produce some thoughts in someone else. The effect of blacking out was that I shared fewer ideas, and so fewer ideas were generated.

So I guess social media is a net positive. And my follower count on Google Plus continued to go up at a healthy pace while I was away. Weird.

I’m ending it earlier than I planned because I keep running into things worth sharing, and social media is a great place for that.

Look back several years. Facebook and Twitter didn’t exist. Google was an amazing search engine. Everyone was talking about how great blogs were, because they let anyone publish.

I liked the world where everyone had their own blog where they shared their thoughts, where people could comment right there on the post, or they could go and write their own post.

This was how people found new things before social media. That world had less noise, and clearer thoughts had an easier time emerging.

Maybe most people never would have made a blog, and they wouldn’t have said anything at all without social media. But how can you really know?

How many independent homes on the web never came to be because that first post happened on Facebook, Twitter or Google+ instead of a freshly created blog? Social media as we practice it today puts too much inside too fragile and too noisy a space.

I want to take the alternate view: that social media, as it’s practiced today, is the wrong way to do things. And it’s hard to find the right way while swimming in the present form.

So I’m cutting it out.

I’m going to stop linking to things on social media. I’m going to stop writing advice on using social media. And I’m going to start commenting more on blogs.

This isn’t a campaign against social media. I don’t expect a lot of people to go along with this experiment, especially since I’m not giving a rousing speech about the evils of Facebook and Google+.

I’m just not using social media for a while to see if I can find a better way to do things. This is why you see that blurb just before comments, encouraging people to write a response on their blog or make a comment.

All I want to do is remind people that there is a world outside the social media gardens (walled and otherwise). We should do that every half decade or so.