Why do your Facebook posts link to this blog?

I’m writing this before I’ve created a Facebook account. This post serves as a pre-commitment to a social media approach that I hope to elaborate on below. I may never create a Facebook account, but this allows me to set the terms should I go ahead and do it. And maybe it can answer some questions about how odd this is.

I’ve spent the better part of four years away from Facebook, and social media in general. I left because I became convinced by several related arguments that social media exploits something fundamental in the human brain. Those arguments still strike me as true; I won’t get much into them here.

When Twitter first started, some people called it a “micro-blog”; maybe that term was used for Facebook and Myspace too. It never really stuck around, the coinage of it shows that at some point, Twitter was an unfamiliar idea to a lot of people, and one way of helping them understand it was to compare it to something they were familiar with: blogs.

Blogs are an interesting point of comparison for social networks. They lack some of the things that I think make social network platforms so awful. But, they also lack the network effects that helped social media platforms kill blogs.

So, the reason I (might) have a Facebook account where I only post links to this blog is because I want to see if its possible to have it both ways.

There is a performative element to a lot of the uses of Facebook. Here’s an example of what I mean. Sometimes someone will click “Like” on a post to communicate to the person making the post that they enjoyed or agreed with the post. But other times, they’ll click “Like” to signal to everyone else that they enjoyed or agreed with the post. Clicking “Like” on a post isn’t a private act - it’s a public act. That’s often precisely the point of doing it. This person could have messaged the poster and said “I liked that post about your dogs”, but they almost never will. Of course a part of that is because it’s easier to click “Like” than it is to type up the message. That surely explains most of the times someone clicks “Like” instead of going through the trouble of messaging someone. But it also habituates users into the public, performative aspect of the act.

This isn’t limited to the Like button. Another performative act is a reply comment, or a share. We all know of those instances where a 500 word post stirs up four different 2,500 word replies. One of the four replies may be an earnest engagement in constructive discussion, but the other three have everyone except the poster as the intended audience; the poster is collateral damage.

This isn’t a wag of the finger at people who use Facebook this way. But it is a usage of Facebook that I want to avoid, and it’s something that isn’t really possible on a blog. This post serves as a pre-commitment to not use Facebook in that way. I want to chain myself to the mast.

Another reason for making blog posts instead of Facebook posts is that it’s slightly more of a pain in the ass to make a blog post. It’s not difficult, but you have to jump through a few hoops. That’s a good filtering mechanism. If I’m going to go through the trouble of making a blog post, I’m only going to do it for things that are a bit more considered, and things that are less impulsive.

So why use Facebook at all? Well, that’s where (almost) everyone is. Even if I don’t want to use Facebook a certain way, other people do use it, in all sorts of ways. It’s the town square. People have a more-or-less reasonable expectation that other people will be there. It’s how people keep in touch these days, whether I like it or not. While I’ve enjoyed my abstention from it, it is hermitic.

The manner of using Facebook that I’ve described doesn’t solve all of the problems from the arguments I alluded to at the outset of this post. It solves the performance problem, but it doesn’t solve the problem of observing everyone else’s performances. Facebook, and social media in general, causes or exacerbates all sorts of mental health issues. It may seem paradoxical, but using a tool that seems to connect you to more people often causes you to feel more lonely. Users have lower self-esteem because they’re constantly comparing themselves to a curated version of the people they’re connected to. Its a breeding ground for envy.

Staying away from it has really improved my own mental health, and it’s why I’m uncertain about whether I’ll actually follow through in creating an account again. Part of the purpose of writing this post is to help me think through the trade-offs.

The monks are on to something.