The facebook break and management project: There and back again
Two weeks of facebook use after the break, and resuming abstinence
On August 8, two weeks ago, I interrupted my Facebook sabbatical of 10 days to follow the events at a music convention I was interested in. This would be an opportunity for collecting more data on the issues involving (my as well as others’) internet use habits, how they negatively or positively affect life, and which aspects of it. By comparing the same activities and functions from before the break, during the break, and this week, hopefully I would get some insight.
In a nutshell, the productivity dip was absolute (100% loss), I did follow the convention I was interested in, so that is a positive point, I enjoyed seeing the animal behavior videos that I liked, as well as the music pages I follow, and I had a negative reaction to something I still can’t label. I’d describe it as the act of scrolling in search of a vague target, perhaps some meaningful content, in frustrating failure. It’s mildly distressing and I will come back to this later.
I was interested in the positives this time. The project was justified because I had tentatively identified “problematic social media use behavior” as a source of several setbacks, adverse state of health in general, impaired priority setting and consequent confusion, and mood issues. Of the social media in which I have an account, the only one that is associated with these negative impacts is Facebook. The sabbatical I took from this particular social media resulted in immediate gains overall. Only a return to the previous manner of using that platform could add more information to this set of observations: were the gains preserved and present during the “come back” period? Or were they reversed? Was there any gain? Is it possible to narrow down both the sources of adverse effects and positive ones? Are there any positive ones?
The short animal videos
The short animal behavior videos that most SM platforms have today were the first thing I noticed I enjoyed reconnecting with. I probably didn’t miss them because they are exactly the same as the ones on instagram. In fact, that’s probably 95% of my use of instagram: scrolling through short animal videos while in my morning bathroom sessions. I call that a positive for me. However, it is only positive because I don’t have the sound on on the smartphone, which is what I use to scroll in the bathroom, and I mute all videos when watching on a computer. I also don’t have human interaction on instagram: I just read/watch, or I post and leave it there. During this return to Facebook I realized the only reason I enjoy these videos is that I immediately turn off the sound. So I decided to verify what it was about the sound that disgusted me so much. Granted: almost all the sound is non-music, that type of product the entertainment industry delivers as music to audiences victimized by their overwhelming attack on spontaneous culture. Ok, but these are ideological or economic objections I have, and a general dislike of whatever the genre of that monstrosity is. What about the sensory experience itself? And then I got somewhere. It’s the voices. The highly altered voices, particularly the female lead ones, with that echoed, doubled, and “hickuped” effect, cause discomfort. Some type of physical discomfort, particularly on the left ear, the one originally with an atypical cochlear structure and where hyperacusis feels more painful. Some of the common effects used in techno and club music also cause discomfort, but I don’t know what they trigger more: anger or this borderline painful sensation. It doesn’t end there, though. I realized the reason they offend me is because they anthropomorphize the animals. Those millions of videos about “sweet mamas” and “sweet babies”, “best friends”, “mommy brought a new baby brother” - that truly offends me. Does it offend me because of the obvious traditional western nuclear family propaganda? Or is it because it is disrespecting other species? I don’t know. Maybe a little bit of both. This short animal video phenomenon interests me. There is the obvious drive to make them, which is to attract thousands of reactions and this way rapidly build a higher impact social media account for commercial purposes. A typical contemporary “side hustle”. But there is something else I can’t exactly put my finger on, concerning indirect persuasive discourse (propaganda). I must resist the temptation to follow this particular research rabbit hole at all costs.
Pages and groups on my special interests
In the past 19 years, since I started using social media, I have changed my approach to them from time to time. Everybody changes their approaches unconsciously or in response to a life event, but what I mean here is that I made a deliberate change in the ways I used the platform, in the manner I presented myself, both descriptively and visually. That’s a topic for a different essay. What matters is that I conducted one such change about two or three years ago, in the short period of time in which I came down with COVID, developed long COVID, lost my Dad, broke up with my family, and developed chronic pain and hyperinflammatory syndromes. I still kept my Elitefts column, but I was interacting more with different social circles. My personal account became very political and personal, and I left the training and sports content to the pages and groups. Following that, I unfriended over 90% of my friends list and sent friend requests to those I wanted to keep on the same day. Mass deletion, selective reconnection. With the breakup with my family and the serious health issues from 2022, I downsized my account even more. Most contacts were irrelevant in terms of content. Institutional and project pages were different: there was interesting content shared there and, because all comments were made by uninteresting strangers, I didn't feel compelled to read them. In fact, reading them reissues the adverse experiences.
In the past two years, as I deleted items from my friends list, and left most groups I belonged to, I followed more interesting pages and subscribed to a few groups.
During this return-to-facebook period, it was pleasant to reconnect to the pages. Pleasant, but without a sense of urgency or “fear of missing out”: there is nothing time-sensitive to see there.
Human interactions: post authors
Reconnecting to the content created by some authors was positive. Of this set of authors, very few are not personal contacts with whom I have private interaction. While I liked getting in touch with them again, I can’t say there is any “fear of missing out”. Not in content, not in affective comfort: making contact every 10 days, or every month is quite enough to satisfy this need, which I don’t even know if I have.
Also, even if the author is a friendly (not accidental use of combat language), other commenters are not, so I still avoid commenting on other people’s posts or in groups. Those two are the main sources of negative interactions.
Human interactions: strangers
That would have been bad if it had been explicit. It wasn’t. Most strangers I read, accidentally or not, either annoyed me or triggered a response, which most of the time I managed to repress. The few times I didn’t, I deleted what I wrote immediately. However, a few posts from mutual help groups from Oklahoma popped up on my screen. These groups are a fascinating (or horrifying, depending on what one is reading that for) window into US poverty, particularly white poverty. Maybe because the group leaders are usually white, evangelical females, it’s possible they attract predominantly poor white females. For them, these groups are a lifeline. They are the only thing filling the space left after safety social networks were disarticulated by a combined bombarding effort by government agencies, evangelical churches and the usual corporate oppressors.
That is one of the positive roles played by social media, suggesting a few things. First and foremost, it shows that these platforms, particularly those that, like facebook, require mutual acceptance for a contact link to be established, favor the formation of circular networks, as opposed to vertical ones. Actual, activist mutual help networks are always circular and involve at all levels the whole community. Once destroyed, these vertical and dangerously loose social media groups are what is left. And they are not just positive: they are critical and essential.
Up to now, I just described bird watching, kind of the opposite of participant observation. I did some bird watching on a couple of other groups, left a few because of that, bird watched my own timeline some more, wondered who the hell were those people posting completely uninteresting stuff, and unfriended several.
That is it on strangers.
Human interaction: significance of exposing X offering my content
I have been shadow-banned since I started publishing analyses related to my recent experience with the OK health clinics and services, marked by felonies such as malpractice, medical abandonment, and medical negligence. This is not a guess: we tested this hypothesis and it was confirmed right away, as in automatic post deletion on twitter, and a survey with my friends showing that this type of content never appears on their timelines. This strongly affected my ability to use social media for my protection and to obtain support and advice during a period in which I was sick and in need of assistance. American non-profits are 100% useless when it comes to assisting individuals who seek their support. I started questioning the usefulness of social media as a tool for grassroots organizing and social safety network articulation.
Therefore, when I published a few posts during this “facebook comeback” period, I didn’t really expect much reaction. Some of these posts were mini-essays on relevant topics. One was a set of suggestions to the music society that organized the convention I watched. The suggestions were in the direction of incorporating more non-Western music traditions where the harmonica makes an appearance, as well as inviting performers from non-Western countries. I received very polite and very few replies, and a general awkward silence when I suggested that the solution to the visa problems the society had when trying to bring such players was rotating host countries.
Another was about the dessacration of Robert Johnson’s grave by a Christian fundamentalist that cleans it every year. I described the episode, his angry rants against the religious offerings left at the site, and an altercation between him and a guitar player who begged him not to throw away the guitar picks left there as offerings. This was very shocking to me and the only response I had was from a friend with whom I have constant private contact.
A few warnings about dangerous trends in Brazilian politics were also received with deliberate indifference.
It is hard to avoid the conclusion that using facebook to share important analytical content is just dumb of me, and for me.
Communication: the strong response trigger
My chief problem with social media is not social media proper, but my tendency to respond to certain triggers. By respond or react, I don’t mean just the visible comments or even emoticons. Whether I write it or not, I automatically respond to certain issues, as if they were “writing prompts”. I concluded that the automatic response taking place was analysis. Apparently I am not skilled at bypassing these “prompts” and sailing through issues without analyzing them. That makes these prompts unhealthy for me.
Communication: lack of
It has been profusely pointed out that an alarming communication failure can be observed, studied and measured on digital communication sites, aka social media platforms. Individually, though, this varies greatly, or at least it seems to. How much this affects each person is probably a combination of the general trend as expressed in a particular sub-network, and the individual’s communication styles. My communication style is particularly vulnerable to poor, ambivalent, contradictory, ambiguous, non-linear, and poorly written communication. It’s a disaster. After 10 days of not being exposed to all this, the comeback was nasty. Again, the nastiness is related to reactions I can’t control, such as furiously trying to figure out the lacking punctuation, or subject, or some other grammatical element from a paragraph. But that’s very peculiar to me, as it was to my father.
Effect on productivity
These were two weeks of complete unproductivity. I did not touch the aging and training chapter of the series, I didn’t publish the short articles derived from the anchors, I didn’t record videos, I didn’t even study music. Part of this total failure can be attributed to a virus: we caught a digestive bug in my home and were pretty miserable for a whole week. Another factor was the heat. The past month has been the hottest in recorded history in Oklahoma (and the world as well) by any metric. Surprisingly, I haven’t suffered with this beyond a general lethargy, which honestly I can’t separate from my chronic fatigue lethargy. I believe the biggest impact on this has been the facebook comeback move.
Effect on clarity and hierarchical thinking
I’ve written extensively on the confusion associated with chronic fatigue and pain, also known as “brain fog”. This is a physiological condition directly caused by the chronic phenomena that became my default setting since the start of long COVID. However, there is also contextual confusion, and they are very different. The chronic fatigue “brain fog” is not just confusion. It is confusion, combined with perceptual changes in light, sound, balance and other sensory issues. Loss of clarity and hierarchical thinking associated with social media participation is something else: there is no change in physical comfort or discomfort, and it is accompanied by a heightened mood (anxiety, anger). I have no doubt that it results from hyper-reactiveness to random “relevant” content. Everything becomes important, and important to respond to, because content is not processed by my priority hierarchy system.
Does it matter if you are autistic?
This newsletter is called “dissimilis animus” because I proposed to present issues related to dealing with the world from the perspective of a different, less common, behavioral phenotype that I carry. After all, I do have an informal diagnosis of Asperger syndrome, which is not a nosological class anymore, and therefore I am autistic. As I mentioned before, I am not even sure how long the autism nosological class is going to resist the massive failure to inform productive research, the general frustration from researchers, and the obvious epistemological unsustainability.
In any case, readers have a legitimate expectation that the topic of my essay in a newsletter will also be “about autism”. Most leaders in the neurodivergence movement, or autism movement, make a point of associating whatever they are discussing with the diagnosis. In the immense majority of cases, these claims are either unsupported by evidence, or, worse, they are supported by articles that commit all possible methodological mistakes to pigeonhole their conclusions.
Is the adverse social media experience that I am documenting something associated with my neurodivergent phenotype? No, it’s not. Or maybe it is, but there is no measured association between adverse experience and ASD diagnosis. This is about me and my weirdnesses, my deviations from the average of behavioral variables normal curve, possibly my genes, my traumas, and the resulting uniqueness that I and all the other 9 billion folks out there carry.
Possible inferences and moving forward
Autonomy and its loss
Much of the conflicts and adverse reactions I described here are related to a central quality of life issue: autonomy. It’s about losing the self-determination ability to choose what to devote my attention to, my analytical effort, and what to provide a response to. At the end of the day, in a society whose institutions aggressively attack citizen’s self-sufficiency and rights, it’s about who decides what I pay attention to, what causes I commit to, what issues are important that I analyze, interpret, and eventually respond to.
This is not just about algorithm manipulation. This is certainly a general problem, but not the one actively harming me. This is about my inability to filter input and remain internally unreactive to whatever I decide is not what I need to focus on at the moment.
Autonomy and self-determination are priority items in any social cause, and in the quest for quality of life for anyone and everyone. If I lack the defense mechanisms to protect my self-determination while using a given social media platform, as long as I don’t acquire some, that social media is not a “place” I can safely exist without taking damage.
Reaction triggers and responsiveness
In this experience, I identified what I am here calling “hyper-reactiveness” to topics and cues. Now I know I do that, I know that I lack important tools to control that, and so I prefer to adopt a deliberate managed distance from facebook as long as I still have none. Maybe, however, this is an interesting feature to measure in order to help individuals decide how to reclaim their autonomy. How able are they to autonomously decide what to engage with and what to ignore?
The inevitability of “automatic analysis”
Following on from the previous item, my ability to autonomously decide what to engage with is impaired by what I am calling “automatic analysis”. I am an analyst by educational background, degree, decades of professional experience, but also by personality. In terms of “automatic analysis”, I am the textbook “patient”: I’ve been professionally and methodologically connecting scientific dots since I was an undergraduate student. But I think I have been connecting analytical dots since way before that, though. I am absolutely unable to bypass analysis when presented to anything - from the last episode in the Ukraine war, to a fashion statement. Some authors claim that this is a useful skill, a skill that makes weirdos like me “special”. I can understand being special or rare, but useful? Really? To be unable to turn off the analysis function, does anyone truly think this is a good thing or a comfortable thing? It is hell! And it does make social media not only a source of adverse experience, but also dangerous. It’s easy to get lost in analytical labyrinths.
Social safety networks: any chance we can use SM for that? Probably not.
One of the most important benefits of social media most authors can agree with is offering qualitative advantages to organizing. Therefore, they should be super useful to vulnerable and oppressed communities, right? Yes and no. Social safety networks are a key to survival in many societies, this one more than most. They are, by definition, mutual aid networks. Also by definition, mutual aid networks only function if they are as horizontal as possible. Most digital communities couldn’t be farther from this: the larger the group, the more tightly they are controlled by a handful of individuals who harvest their social capital, the source of their power, from the control they exert over that group. With few exceptions, digital communities, facebook groups in particular, are not mutual aid networks. At best, they broker cross-help, while actively obstructing organizing.
Given the lack of tradition in horizontal social movement organizing in contemporary US, I am not optimistic about the potential of social media to host true mutual aid networks. Moreover, the more they approach social justice conflicts, the less likely social media will be risk-free to social action. Meta, the company owning facebook, instagram and whatsapp, has violated the privacy of messages and handed evidence to incriminate a woman who had an abortion. She was convicted of a felony and is serving time in prison. That should tell us how dangerous they are.
Managed distance
At this point, the measure I feel comfortable adopting is a controlled distance use of facebook. I am not worried about the other social media platforms I use because they are just passive information acquisition and provision. I can never use instagram or twitter in any other way, I tried.
Facebook continues to be relevant both professionally and politically, and I still enjoy some informal interaction with a few friends. But that doesn’t need to and cannot happen every day. Once every ten days or a couple of weeks is plenty.
References and further reading
Hodge, E., & Hallgrímsdóttir, H. K. (2021). Networks of hate: the alt-right,“troll culture”, and the cultural geography of social movement spaces online. In British Columbia’s Borders in Globalization (pp. 102-119). Routledge. https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781003219583-7/networks-hate-alt-right-troll-culture-cultural-geography-social-movement-spaces-online-edwin-hodge-helga-kristín-hallgrímsdóttir
Leong, C., Pan, S. L., Bahri, S., & Fauzi, A. (2019). Social media empowerment in social movements: power activation and power accrual in digital activism. European Journal of Information Systems, 28(2), 173-204. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0960085X.2018.1512944
Lavis, A., & Winter, R. (2020). # Online harms or benefits? An ethnographic analysis of the positives and negatives of peer‐support around self‐harm on social media. Journal of child psychology and psychiatry, 61(8), 842-854. https://acamh.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jcpp.13245
Spade, D. (2020). Solidarity not charity: Mutual aid for mobilization and survival. Social Text, 38(1), 131-151. https://read.dukeupress.edu/social-text/article-abstract/38/1%20(142)/131/160175/Solidarity-Not-CharityMutual-Aid-for-Mobilization
Moretta, T., & Buodo, G. (2020). Problematic Internet use and loneliness: How complex is the relationship? A short literature review. Current Addiction Reports, 7, 125-136. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40429-020-00305-z
Balhara, Y. P. S., Doric, A., Stevanovic, D., Knez, R., Singh, S., Chowdhury, M. R. R., ... & Le, H. L. T. C. H. (2019). Correlates of Problematic Internet Use among college and university students in eight countries: An international cross-sectional study. Asian Journal of Psychiatry, 45, 113-120. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1876201819306409
Mamun, M. A., Hossain, M. S., Moonajilin, M. S., Masud, M. T., Misti, J. M., & Griffiths, M. D. (2020). Does loneliness, self‐esteem and psychological distress correlate with problematic internet use? A Bangladeshi survey study. Asia‐Pacific Psychiatry, 12(2), e12386. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/appy.12386
Baloğlu, M., Şahin, R., & Arpaci, I. (2020). A review of recent research in problematic internet use: gender and cultural differences. Current Opinion in Psychology, 36, 124-129. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2352250X20300877