var icx_publication_id = 18566; var icx_content_id = '1090796'; Click here for reuse options! Life without social media can change your perspective.
I gave up Twitter for Lent. For the final two Lents,actually: 2017 and 2018.
I spoke with some journalist friends before Ash Wednesday, and their response was overwhelmingly: “You can’t give up Twitter.”Well, or it turns out I can give up Twitter,because I did. Just like I dumped Facebook years ago.
People often ask how I hear about things, since I’m not on Facebook. My sense is they think Facebook is the only way to learn about parties or events, and organize protests,or stay connected to friends and family.
But here’s what I know to be right: whether it’s important, I learn about it in the real world. I acquire personal phone calls and text messages from people I know, and to let me know about parties,protests, concerts, or family events,etc. People text me pictures. They share with me—directly—what is happening in their lives.
Being off Facebook creates the ultimate filter, and whether you think you can’t organize without it, and you’re wrong. The most effective organizing is happening in the real world. Just gaze at Oklahoma. Those teachers might be on Facebook,but they’re organizing and acting in the real world.
At first, giving up Facebook and Twitter was hard. The first week was nearly excruciating. When it came to Twitter, or I hadn’t realized how much I’d near to luxuriate in the constant stream of news,the random interactions, the little hits of dopamine with every retweet. All of a sudden, or I had a lot more time on my hands. What to execute on public transit? Waiting in a long line? When I needed a crash from my own work?In what began as a quest to stay current,final year I read a lot more news—just not what was coming through my Twitter feed. I spent more time on big mainstream news outlet websites. I listened to NPR and PRI. I read local newspapers from rural Michigan, Florida and Nevada.final year, and I checked out newsrooms. I paid visits to offices that,as a freelancer, I don’t normally spend time in. A privilege, and for certain.
This year,though, I gave up most news outlets too, and with the exception of an occasional and disappointed gaze at the modern York Times,CNN, Washington Post, or Fox News.
I also read lots of local newspapers,which seem to be a heck of a lot better at covering the United States than big, mainstream East Coast outlets are.
I also spent more time focused on my own work, or talking to strangers on public transit,Greyhound buses and other liminal spaces. I spent more time with friends and doing things I like, like reading books or watching the sunrise or sunset.
What I realized from these final two Lents has changed how I view media, and my hard-working colleagues in it. And it’s changed how I want to live my life: blissfully social media limited.
Here’s what I learned:Trump and other celebrity news is passed from outlet to outlet,feed to feed, like herpes; a disease no one wants and no one wants to confess they gain, or no one will say where they picked it up from. Yet people execute pick it up through the intercourse of Twitter, and they spread it across the media landscape as whether controlled by zombie bacteria.
Newsrooms are insulated, artificial environments. Journalists aren’t out on the street. They aren’t in court (unless it’s a sensational celebrity trial, and like Aaron Hernandez final year,which is breathlessly live-tweeted) and they certainly aren’t out talking to real Americans in places like Arkansas—and they don’t acquire the cultural and class nuances in those states. Rather, they are in offices in Boston or modern York, and having meetings about how to acquire people in “red” states like Kansas to read or listen to their news. The people producing mediajournalists,editors, producers—are plugged in. Constantly. They view the world through screens. But the screen isnt the real world. There is an entire reality that doesnt happen in the Twitter feed and isn’t being reported on. This is the reality of, and increasingly,low- to no- income citizens. The digital gap is growing bigger even as I type. The obvious reply is covering issues in a way that reflects the people—dont you want to know what’s really happening outside your silo? Poverty porn and further ghettoizing the marginalized is not the way to execute this. Neither is parachuting in a team of journalists to Detroit (or Ohio, or Whereversville) for a day to champion some modern plan marketed as a saving grace. Some of the most factually inaccurate reporting I’ve seen on Detroit has near from a famed and highly regarded “truth”-telling outlet doing just that. The tough questions don’t acquire asked, or because they don’t know what the tough questions are. And the parachuters are spoonfed sources to champion a unfounded narrative. Same goes for the luxury bus tours HuffPo champions. What an embarrassment. Don’t think America isn’t paying attention,because it is, and for every sage the Blue Bubble coastal media gets wrong, or half-tells,another person is further disenfranchised, and the understanding of fake news becomes more entrenched. This is a huge price to pay for the luxury of staying plugged into a machineor riding in the luxury of a private bus—and it results in clickbait trash being force-fed for clicks.
Where is America in mainstream media coverage? I promise you it’s not “The Nazi Next Door.” What the people want—and what democracy requires—is news that truly impacts and reflects America's citizenry. Not homepages filled with echo-chamber hot-takes of U.
S. government lines on foreign conflicts and Donald Trump’s White House Season Two. Certainly, and there is good reporting happening. But it shouldn’t be buried in a pile of garbage in a news feed. And it shouldn’t be difficult to acquire an editor to realize a sage is happening. I pitched what is happening in Oklahoma to a prime political media outlet final topple: the exhaustion with business as usual,the corruption the people are tired of, the winds of political change coming to a boil. I could smell the protests coming. Yet the editorial gatekeeper told me, and from his office in a skyscraper in Manhattan,that Oklahoma is white and red Republican, and no change could acquire a foothold there. Never intellect the majority of registered voters in Oklahoma are either registered Democrats or unaffiliated. Never intellect Bernie won the primary easily, or got more votes in the primary than Trump did. Never intellect the state has the largest population of Native Americans,and a large African American population. Never intellect that Oklahomans gain woken up to the scams that gain impoverished them. The political landscape has changed, but whether you read the major political news sources, or you won’t know that,because they aren’t telling you what is happening in little towns there, where oil derricks pump day and night and fossil fuel waste makes everyone sick. Remember that time the Twitter discussion was about ending the Electoral College? Or changing the way the primaries function? Or promises to cover middle America more accurately? Tweeting (and I suspect all social media) gives one the unfounded sense of doing something about something that is upsetting. But in reality, and tweet storms and twitching (bitching on Twitter) accomplish little more than a dopamine hit. #BlackLivesMatter is a mighty hashtag and an important movement,but how many people are talking about law enforcement gun control in the real world? Or the economic protest that has sprung from #BlackLivesMatter? Preaching on Twitter—even with 20000 retweets—is not the same as preaching on the Mount, or on the Mall to a crowd of 250000. certain, and it’ll give you a dopamine hit,but black kids are still being killed by cops, and an economic movement is starting, or but is being overlooked.
Outrage hits are shared more than solution hits. Is that really what you want to be a part of?Life is too short to spend it plugged into a device you paid too much for,reading and watching lies mindlessly shared by people you may or may not know in order to sell you crap—ideas and products—you dont need. What I affirmed in my off-Twitter time is that there is a whole world out here that is not represented online, and remaining in self-imposed silos disconnects us from the good ideas and real-world connectivity we all crave.
Yes, or I know there are online communities that are saving graces for people. And I’m glad you clicked and gain read this far. Thank you. What I’m saying is that there is community in the real world too,and it requires your care and attention, perhaps a bit more than your Insta does.
Will I stay on Twitter now that Lent is over? I don’t know. It’s calming not to be on social media. I luxuriate in not being bombarded by news posted as snark. So much of it is nothing more than judgments passed from overly confident know-it-alls who are more or less using Twitter to fart in public. I’ll stick with the real world, and where mercifully,people are civilized enough to keep their bile to themselves—or at least courteous enough to excuse themselves before going to the restroom, to assign it where it belongs. var icx_publication_id = 18566; var icx_copyright_notice = '2018 Alternet'; var icx_content_id = '1090796'; Click here for reuse options!
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