English
15. September 2018

Quit social media

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I have been in a social media crisis for the last couple of years, and it has been bewildering. Cal Newport is pointing the way out of this chaos for me with his call to digital minimalism. I am answering that call. I am done with social media. The thing they all have in common is the short attention span. There is no depth in social media which is why it can eat so much of your time and leave you with virtually nothing in return. It is the internet equivalent of candy.

The draw for social media for me is that it has the promise of being something worthwhile. For instance, I can post a link to this blog post on social media to try and generate traffic. It works in that I get some hits from people who have their curiosity roused. But I know that I will have lost them by the third sentence. The bottom line is that idiots don’t read. The result is that our civil discourse has been reduced to the tweet, the meme, and the 30 second video. I despise this world of the short attention span. The way out is to embrace digital minimalism.

As for promotional purposes and uses, I have to face an uncomfortable but uncompromising reality. When you are a writer, you want readers. People on social media are not readers. Writing is for smart people, and smart people are in the minority. This is why even bestselling authors still have to keep a day job. Most people don’t read. Going forward, I can either keep writing, or I can delete my blog and become exclusively a star on social media. You can be smart, or you can be popular. You can’t be both.

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