How Leaving Social Media Impacted My Relationships
The answer may surprise you.
Mother. Activist. Republican. Democrat. Black. White. Athlete. Brother.
Each of these labels elicits an emotional response, a reaction. Each of these labels may describe a facet of another person, but none begins to capture the entire personhood of whom they are describing. Similar to snapshots, they are a point in time, lacking context — requiring narrative or history to understand the gradations and subtleties of each.
Imagine a snapshot of a group of people, standing together outside on a sunny afternoon. Some are smiling, some look serious. Some of the aforementioned labels might be present — a Mother holding a child. A muscular middle-aged Black man, with his arm around the man next to him. Perhaps he is an activist, perhaps a brother, perhaps neither. But without knowing the context, we don’t really know anything about these people.
What if the context was a family reunion? What if it was a Crossfit group gathering? What if it was a barbeque following a celebration of life ceremony, or a barbeque after a high school graduation? The same barbeque at the same place with the same people might feel completely differently, depending on the context.
Without knowing more, we simply don’t know what to make of the image except for the most basic, unsophisticated inferences. We’d probably define it using a few labels and move on. A description would help, certainly — but it still wouldn’t do the situation justice. Being physically present, however, would allow us to truly share in the experience: to know what it smelled like that day, to feel the atmosphere of the group, to participate in conversation and community and create shared memories.
Without context and relationship, it’s easy to default to labels that lack nuance and fail to capture the entire picture.
I recently wrote a post about the negative ROI of social media (Return on Investment — basically, what you receive in exchange for what you give) in my own life, and after reconnecting with old friends last night, another glaring issue surfaced. Like a snapshot without context or lived experience, social media tends to reduce users to labels, where one must ‘pick a side’ at the expense of everything else that might be true of the individual. The value that each of us can bring to each other is stripped away and lost. What a tragedy.
Social media in and of itself is not a replacement for relationship — it can be anything from a self-created hall of mirrors to a place to post your restaurant’s takeout menu and hours during the COVID-19 pandemic, but no real relationships are formed or fostered there that didn’t already exist. Some of the folks I got to see and speak with last night via Zoom I hadn’t seen in person in years. This was completely irrelevant. We reconnected instantly, having shared homes and classes and travel and years of lived experience. At no point was it detrimental that I deleted Facebook and have not posted anything to social media in over a year. Nothing about our friendships or relationships was fundamentally different. If anything, social media acts an amplifier to existing relationships, ideas and beliefs, rather than as a platform for meaningful engagement and learning.
The general populace spends an ever-increasing amount of time on social media daily, making those hours unavailable for engaging in real life, away from a screen. Given that at least 70% of communication is non-verbal, it would seem to follow that forming relationships and sharing meaningful experiences with others is impossible via social media, as I realized last night. There’s no body language, tone of voice, or context — not to mention that the so-called ‘communication’ doesn’t take place in a real time conversational exchange. Instead, one can construct an alternate, curated reality. It’s convenient to ‘like’ and forward things that we resonate and agree with — things that don’t challenge our assumptions and for that matter are very likely not representative of reality. Taking a step back and intentionally engaging with others, especially with others that don’t look like us, is a place to start in order to combat and heal the polarized culture within which we currently live. A place to start when it comes to seeking common ground and reconciliation.
Reconciliation hinges on our ability as a society to seek out and enter into relationships with folks of different ethnicities, backgrounds, social statuses, and education levels. Multiple studies indicate that humans tend to fear and avoid things that are different; instead, we search for and prefer things that are similar, which ultimately plays out in hiring decisions and serves to further enforce our echo-chambers of similarity. Perhaps this was a useful tendency when it came to avoiding predatory species or hostile tribes in the pre-historic savannah, but this way of thinking has no place in functional democratic society today.
Relationship and shared experience are anathema to assumptions and to reducing others to labels. Hollywood knows this. Dallas Buyers Club and Green Book depict this beautifully; both are based on true stories, and both were nominated for and won multiple Oscars. Its easy to reduce others to labels, and hate what we fear. As both movies demonstrate, however, its quite difficult to hate a person that we’d previously reduced to a label when they make us smile, teach us something, or show us love. I would posit that its actually impossible.
If we can celebrate the defeat of assumptions and resulting reconciliation on the silver screen, why can’t we do it in our everyday lives? Take a minute today to think about the last time you engaged with someone outside of your social circle, outside of your ethnic group, outside of your class level, or outside of your neighborhood. Put down your device and consider whether you have the opportunity to regularly engage with others, in real life, that challenge your assumptions. If not, could you seek out engagement with an open mind?
In a dark and darkening season in terms of job loss, uncertainty, and mortality, opportunities abound for connection with others, particularly those that may be down. Could you reach out to someone you see that’s struggling? Or perhaps volunteer at your local food bank or homeless shelter?
Simpler yet — the next time you’re at the grocery store, could you make eye contact with the cashier and ask them how their day is going — and really listen? Not for the sake of formulating a response, but to indicate genuine interest, perhaps with the altruistic agenda of expressing appreciation for how difficult and stressful their job has become as a result of COVID-19. Or perhaps with the agenda of simply listening. As my late Grandfather used to quip — “the Good Lord gave you two ears and one mouth for a reason!”
Social media and mainstream news have conditioned us to be response ready and to communicate authoritatively with ‘the answer,’ instead of exchanging words inquisitively with an open mind. As a result, we’re all missing out on what each other has to say. It’s a race to the bottom — we’re tearing each other down instead of lifting each other up.
Could you intentionally seek out the cashier that appears most dissimilar to yourself and offer an unsolicited compliment or affirmation? Could you make a habit of doing this?
As Abraham Lincoln once intoned “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” Among other things, the COVID-19 pandemic revealed bitter divisions rife throughout the United States that are exacerbated and echoed on social media.
Will you join me today in seeking real relationships and unity, instead of polarization and ‘behind the screen’ distraction? One conversation at a time, we have the opportunity to change the narrative for the better. We as a society are better than we’re behaving. Lets start today and act like it.
