Believe it or not, I am taking a year-long break from Facebook and Instagram.
That may or may not be surprising.
On the one hand, social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram are such a big part of our life that it can seem strange to go without them for long.
But, on the other hand, if you are anything like me, sometimes social media feels overwhelming.
If you feel that way, as I often do, a long break may not seem that strange.
I decided in March to take my year-long break.
And I want to explain why and what I have learned so far, but first, let me tell you about a writer named Neil Postman that had a big impact on me in my early adult years.
Neil Postman was a writer, educator, and media theorist who wrote several famous books like Technopoly and Amusing Ourselves to Death.
In such books, he examines in depth the way media, especially television, radically changes the way we think and relate to the world in ways we don’t realize, if we don’t take time to stop and think about it
Picture by Ajeet Mestry, courtesy of Unsplash.
I was first introduced to Neil Postman when I read the book Amusing Ourselves to Death in my twenties.
In this book, Neil Postman critiques the way television frequently juxtaposes the serious and the trivial, seemingly weighing them with equal seriousness.
For example, I remember Postman giving an example of a news story on the television about a deadly plane crash that was then quickly followed by a commercial of something like Dairy Queen ice cream.
Plane picture, courtesy of Unsplash. Ice cream picture, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
Now, you might be thinking to yourself, big deal. That’s how television works.
That, I believe, was my first reaction, too.
But consider how different that scenario is to the way society worked in previous eras before television.
In past eras before TV was ubiquitous, when people received bad news, they cried. They mourned.
Or, at the very least, they paused, giving space to recognize the horrible event that had just occurred.
What they didn’t do is announce horrible news—the tragic deaths of hundreds of people—and then proclaim, “Let’s now go sell some tasty ice cream!”
To do so would have trivialized human suffering and death.
This would have been a dishonorable and disrespectful thing to do.
And most of us recognize this on some level.
And yet the medium of television, Postman argues, conditions us to accept such trivializations as commonplace.
Terrible death. Now ice cream!
In his book, Technopoly, Postman develops this argument when he writes,
New technologies change what we mean by ‘knowing’ and ‘truth’; they alter those deeply embedded habits of thought which give to a culture its sense of what the world is like—a sense of what is the natural order of things, of what is reasonable, of what is necessary, of what is inevitable, of what is real (Vintage, 1993, 12).
In other words, technology inevitably shapes how we see and experience the world around us.
I think most of us have first-hand experience with Postman’s point, even if we don’t realize it.
For example, consider news sources.
If we stop and imagine how many of our parents and grandparents got their news growing up, we are likely aware that our parents read a local newspaper or well-respected periodical like the Times or, perhaps, Newsweek.
These sources came out regularly, but they took a while to print.
That’s because the stories were usually carefully written, vetted by editorial boards, and double-checked for accuracy and respectability.
Picture by Rishabh Sharma, courtesy of Unsplash.
Because of this, frequently (although not always) people greatly valued good, sound journalism.
They generally respected the news.
In addition, the news provided common ground that people from all walks of life could use as a springboard for reasonable discussion.
This is a somewhat rosy view of the news in bygone eras.
But it certainly accurate in many regards, which we realize if we compare this to how people receive the news today.
People today frequently receive their news from 24-hour news programs like Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, or social media sites.
Needless to say, if your goal is 24-hour titillating news coverage, your goal is no longer carefully researched, ethical, and informative news casting.
Rather, your goal becomes 24-hour sturm und drang—or constant drama.
Picture by Wyron A, courtesy of Unsplash.
Because that attracts people.
It riles them up.
And it gets them addicted to cortisol rushes so they keep coming back for more.
Revenues increase!
The message we receive, implicitly or explicitly, in many of these 24-hour news programs is,
The world is a horrible place and all your enemies are out to destroy you. Stay tuned for the next outrage. And also, here is some ice cream and a girl in a bikini to entertain you as the world burns down.
The medium is the message.[1]
In other words, the very medium through which we receive messages–in this case, attention-seeking, poorly researched news–teaches us, even if don’t realize it, how to view ourselves, other people, and the world around us.
For example, Postman adds,
To a man with a camera, everything looks like an image. To a man with a computer, everything looks like data (Vintage, 1993, 14).
My contemporary take on Postman’s ideas:
To a person with 24-hour, shoddily-researched news cycles, the world becomes a terrifying adrenaline rush;
Enemies lurk everywhere;
Emotion is more important than the careful search for clarifying truth;
And ice cream and plane crashes are equally important, which really means that nothing is, in fact, meaningful or important.
Back in high school, long before I read Neil Postman, I had first-hand experience of the truth underlying his ideas.
To explain this, let me tell you about the year that my family decided to get rid of our TV.
I was in high school in the 80s, and I very clearly remember feeling like TV was taking over the world and that this was a bad thing.
It may help you to know that I grew up in Oregon, and although I remember watching TV, I also have very vivid memories of playing outside with my brother and my cousins growing up.
We spent many happy hours riding our bikes, climbing trees, hanging out in our self-constructed fort which we called “Looney Tunes”, fighting rubber band gun wars, and creating elaborate walkie talkies by drawing “technology” on discarded wooden blocks.
Picture by Henrik Hageland, courtesy of Unsplash.
There was adventure, intrigue, occasionally fear (like when we explored the woods adjacent to my nearby elementary school), and lots of creativity.
I also had some wonderful older aunts who were teenagers when I was little.
And they (delightfully) spent a lot time drawing with me and reading wonderful books like the Chronicles of Narnia.
And then to top it all off, I had the privilege of attending a day camp in rural Oregon in the summer in which I got to hike all day, swim and canoe, play games and do crafts, and spend time with barnyard animals.
I don’t tell you this story to make my childhood seem perfect—although it was indeed wonderful in so many ways.
Rather, I tell you this story because, as you can imagine, growing up this way deeply impacted my view of the world.
It taught me that although there were bad things in the world, many of which I heard about on TV, the world was primarily a beautiful, magical place full of adventure.
When I got older, my family moved to Colorado.
Now, Colorado is a beautiful state filled with nature, too, which I will return to shortly.
But I was entering high school and facing new academic pressures.
Also, my neighborhood layout was different, and for a while I didn’t have anyone in my neighborhood to play with.
All this made it hard to play outside.
Suddenly, I felt like I was indoors all the time, watching a lot of TV.
I wasn’t the only one.
TV really took off in the 80s, during the decade I was entering high school.
For example, in the early 1950’s, only about 9% of households owned a TV. And those that did spent about 4 hours a day watching it.
But TV ownership expanded rapidly over the next decades.[2]
By the 80s, about 98% of households owned a TV and spent about 7 hours a day watching it.[3]
(TV viewership peaked in 2009-2010, with the average American, watching about 9 hours daily.[4])
I didn’t know these TV statistics in my teen years, but I felt the cultural shift.
It felt like TV was taking over everyone’s life.
To make matters worse, when watching TV, I often found myself bombarded by frightening, violent, or crude TV content and feeling completely overwhelmed by it.
I had a lot of anxiety in high school, and TV often made me more anxious and upset.
Drawing and Painting by Shelly P. Johnson
It felt like TV was taking over and ruining everything.
Picture by Nabil Saleh, courtesy of Unsplash.
This made me mad.
I ended up talking to my brother about all this.
We were very close and often had deep conversations. So, I told him about hating TV, and we decided to talk to parents about possibility of getting rid of it for a while.
Amazingly, they said yes.
I don’t know if we planned on getting rid of it permanently or just a year or so. It ended up being about two years.
Those years were extremely beneficial for both me and my brother.
We both became avid readers.
Picture by Ed Robertson, courtesy of Unsplash.
And I remember playing outside a lot more with my neighborhood friend, Kiersten.
We really got into frisbee and spent hours in a field full of flowers and birds behind a church across the street, teaching ourselves a bunch of cool frisbee tricks.
I felt surrounded by nature, fun, friends, and creativity.
My dad was the pastor of the church, and during the year we didn’t have a TV, I remember going over the church while he was working in his office on his sermon.
I sat in the sanctuary, which was so beautiful and quiet, and l looked at old hymn books. The hymns were deeply poetic, and I learned a lot about language reading them.
I still love singing hymns to this day.
Picture by Tracy Jentzsch, courtesy of Unsplash.
(Note: My family is from the Quaker tradition, and this is a picture of a Quaker meeting house. My church didn’t look quite like this, but it captures well the simplicity and peace of the sanctuary in our church.)
They also helped me feel more connected to the Divine and like I had a meaningful place in the universe.
I felt more peaceful, creative, and curious than I had in a long time, and I decided I liked not watching TV.
I realized that I experienced the world differently.
My brain felt more active, alert, and engaged, and I experienced other people and the world outside me in a deeper, more magical way.
I also spent much a lot more time creating my own ideas through reading, writing, drawing, and doing other creative projects.
My husband and I did not have a TV for the first 10 years of our marriage, and it created a beautiful space, I believe, for communication, creativity, and mindfulness.
We have a TV now, but it is shut away in a cabinet.
Doing this allows us to remind ourselves that TV only enters our life when we say it can and when it contributes to our overall well-being.
And this brings me back to my current social media sabbatical.
Initially when I joined social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram, they were a wonderful way for me to connect with family, as well as with old and new friends.
And they were also a wonderful way for me to express myself creatively through writing, art, and photography.
I believe these platforms can, indeed, be an excellent medium to do things like this.
But in the last few years, these same social media sites started to feel like a burden—like they were taking over and taking away much more than they were giving to me personally.
Picture by Mariia Shalabaieva, courtesy of Unsplash.
So, I decided to do an experiment similar to my TV experiment in high school. I decided to take a year-long sabbatical from Facebook and Instagram.
(Now, I still get on Facebook and Instagram occasionally to manage a page for a work program I help direct. And I will occasionally post blog posts, too.)
I am about two-and-a-half months into my year-long sabbatical, and here are three things I have learned:
One: Social Media platforms can skew our sense of experience.
In March, shortly after my sabbatical, my husband came in and announced to me that our apple trees, which we planted several years ago, had a bunch of baby apples growing on them.
I was elated!
Picture courtesy of John Johnson (my husband).
But you know what my first instinct was? It was to rush out and take pictures of the apples so I could post them on FB.
And that bothered me. A lot.
It bothered me because I realized that, for some reason, I had learned to feel like an experience wasn’t truly meaningful unless I posted it on social media. Quelle horreur!
I had a similar experience a few nights later when I was picking strawberries in my backyard strawberry patch.
Picture by Shelly P. Johnson
My first instinct was to take a picture and post it.
I thought to myself, “Social media has conditioned me to feel like the Meta-universe is what is most real, rather than the world around me.”
Upon realizing this, I have consciously worked at taking fewer pictures and forgetting about any other world than the world right in front of me.
Not surprisingly, the world in front of me has grown in meaning and magic.
Two: Social media can work us into a state of constant emotional dysregulation.
One of the things that bothers me the most about social media is that I don’t have much control over what I see.
Social media takes me to a home page, and the first thing I see is whatever people decide to post or whatever the algorithms think I want to see.
Frequently, these posts are filled with drama, stress, and painful world events that overwhelm me and that I don’t have the emotional reserves to cope with effectively—certainly not 24/7.
Since I have been on my social media sabbatical, I have become more peaceful.
That is because I have made conscious decisions about choosing what I see and when I see it, choosing what information I can process productively.
In addition to my social media sabbatical, I decided to take a several month news sabbatical.
Instead of consistently checking the news every day (because I feel like I must stay informed), I check it only when I feel like I can handle the news peacefully.
Drawing and painting by Shelly P. Johnson
And I only check the news stories I feel like investigating.
Constant exposure to stressful, dramatic news or social media information—much of which we have no control over—drives us into a constant state of emotional dysregulation.
And when we are emotionally dysregulated, it is hard to handle any part of our life wisely, peacefully, and lovingly.
We begin to feel hopeless and like we cannot make any positive change.
My social media break has definitely helped me practice better emotional regulation, and it has helped me focus on positive changes I can make in the world.
For example, I am currently working on a character education grant which helps college students cultivate virtues like love, justice, and responsibility.
I am also currently planning a community garden with a colleague.
My husband and I worked for several hours last night planting the garden. It was beautiful outside and such a joy to get this project off the ground.
These activities not only help me feel like I make a positive difference in the world, they DO make a positive difference.
Thirdly: My social media sabbatical has created more space for creativity and connection
During the years I have been on social media, I have consistently worked not to scroll through social media mindlessly.
I knew this wasn’t a good idea.
Nevertheless, my social media sabbatical has made me aware that not only was I spending more time on social media than was wise, my time on these sites was also detracting from other meaningful activities.
Since I have been on my sabbatical, I have had more energy and time for the following:
Journaling
Writing a book I have been working on for a while
Reading
Gardening
Spending time with friends and neighbors
Cleaning
Drawing and painting
Picture by Shelly P. Johnson
Cooking (I have discovered a Korean Beef Bowl recipe that is out of this world!)
These are just a few of the meaningful activities I have invested more time in.
Believe it or not, I still like social media.
And I think there is a good chance I will go back on it on in one form or the other after my sabbatical, much like I still have a TV, even though I loved the benefits of not having one for over ten years.
Technology and technological change is a part of life.
Complete resistance to it is probably unwise and unnecessary.
What is necessary is for us to make space consistently to reflect on the way technology changes our lives for better or worse and make good choices accordingly.
As Niel Postman writes,
The accusation can be made that the uncontrolled growth of technology destroys the vital sources of our humanity.
It creates a culture without a moral foundation. It undermines certain mental processes and social relations that make human life worth living. Technology, in sum, is both friend and enemy (Technopoly, Vintage, 1993, xii).
Right on, Neil.
My blog is titled Resilient and More, and I believe that careful, intentional social media use makes us more resilient because it helps us be more mindful, emotionally regulated, and invested in meaningful, nourishing activities.
Here’s me wishing you wise social media use and peace.
I’ll write more later about adventures in my social media break.
