1683: Peace and Quiet

At my new job, I don’t have full Internet access yet — I only just got access to the office network — and thus I can’t spend all day gazing at Twitter. Fiddling around with mobile phones during working time is also somewhat frowned upon — not that this stops some people around my area doing it — and so I haven’t been tempted to sit there pulling-to-refresh all day. In fact, my phone spent most of today locked in my desk drawer.

My God, how pleasant it is to be free of social media, and in a three-dimensional environment filled with real people who are nice and pleasant and have senses of humour and don’t spent every waking hour filled with an all-consuming rage about something, anything, everything. (My manager claimed to be “in a rage” with the IT department when I arrived at work this morning and my login credentials still weren’t working, but it was one of the most mild-mannered rages I’ve ever seen, particularly compared to the worst the Internet has to offer.) I can feel an improvement to my mental health already, which is confirming something that I’ve suspected for a while:

While social media is great, I also think it has great potential to be harmful.

I’m not just talking about the “everyone, even hateful idiots, being given a voice to broadcast their opinions” thing here. I’m also talking about, from my own personal perspective, the frustration, annoyance, anger and feeling of impotent helplessness that stems from seeing other people being so utterly, wilfully stupid and being unable to convince them that yes, they are, in fact, being a bit of a dick.

This is my own issue, of course; I take a lot of things personally, particularly online, and when someone disagrees with me aggressively — as many people tend to do on the Internet, because respectful disagreements are rapidly becoming a thing of the past — I feel like I’m being attacked. Hell, I’ve seen friends of mine get attacked for something innocuous they’ve said, and, of course, there’s that horrible incident I suffered a while back that actually led to me leaving Twitter altogether for a while.

For people like me, though, this isn’t a healthy mental attitude to take, and it’s here that social media’s biggest benefit — the opportunity to expose yourself (not like that, pervert) to people you otherwise would never have come into contact with in a million years — is also its biggest drawback. The reason you would never have come into contact with those people in a million years without social media is because you move in completely different circles and you are fundamentally incompatible with one another. And, you know, that’s sort of fine, really. If coming into contact with these people leads to nothing but arguments and aggression, that’s not a valuable social interaction. No-one is learning anything from that experience; there’s no “cultural exchange” going on.

This isn’t to say you should only ever surround yourself with an echo chamber of people who feel the same way as you, of course. Work somewhere with a large number of people and it’s likely you’ll come into contact with at least a few people you simply don’t get on with, for example — but when dealing with those people face-to-face it’s much easier to just simply either stay out of their way or at least be polite to them; online, meanwhile, there are no filters in place, which means there’s nothing stopping people with fundamentally different ideologies from calling each other every name under the sun. And not stopping until it escalates into full-on abuse and harassment.

I’m still keeping Twitter around for now, since it’s my main means of communicating with a lot of far-flung friends around the globe. But my few days of going “cold turkey” during the daytime have all but broken my habit. And that, I can’t help but think, is a good thing.

I promise I’ll stop writing about this shit tomorrow and write about something more cheerful and/or interesting instead.