I follow you everywhere
Everyone’s connected
But no-one is connecting
Is anyone else exhausted by being perpetually and instantly connected to everyone and everything? I am. I’m tired of the endless contest we’ve let ourselves be drawn into. I’m fed up with watching people shout past one another into a digital void instead of attempting to listen. I’m tired of being constantly reachable and of physically cringing at the notification sounds on my phone.
There’s no escape any longer, and I’m exhausted.
The first social media platforms emerged at the dawn of computing: bulletin boards on the ARPANET were created and used in the early 1970s and remained popular into the late 1980s. In the 1990s, the advent of HTML sparked a boom in forums and blogs. During the Web 2.0 revolution of the 2000s, sharing images and videos became simpler and more affordable, propelling sites such as Facebook and Twitter to dominance—a position they retain today.
When the Social Media Blitz began, it was promoted as a means to stay connected with distant friends and family, and showcase the best moments of our lives. It’s unfortunate that it didn’t remain that way. Instead, the internet’s veil of anonymity has become a habit people rely on all too frequently. Although your name and photo are displayed, you exist merely as a line of text on a webpage—not a person concealed behind a screen and keyboard. The Veil has led people to believe they can say whatever hateful things they please—things that would never be said face-to-face.
Social networks remain "free" because we are the product: platforms profit by selling your data to advertisers and aggregators. They don’t only collect what you share on the platform; they follow your activity across the web and fold that behavior into a detailed profile to sell to anyone willing to pay for it. The revenue at stake creates huge financial incentives for these companies to keep you engaged and spending as much time on their platforms as possible. The algorithms get adjusted to show you more and more sensational things, leading to more engagement, leading to the creation of even more sensationalized headlines, which leads to even more engagement—and the cycle continues.
Had social media sites stuck to their original goals and intentions, I believe they could have succeeded in bringing us all closer together. Instead, they've become nothing more than free mass surveillance outlets that have been incentivized to create and maintain a rift between us. I can’t remain involved in this experiment any longer — it’s unhealthy for all of us and preventing humanity from progressing.
This is the end of the Social Media road for me.
I’ll be here, creating posts to share with anyone interested — or perhaps simply for myself, to document my life without being constantly immersed in negativity.
I do hope you check back.
Until next time…
Stay sane.