All is Well in the Facebook Echo Chamber

To those of you who followed me over from Facebook, I just want to say thank you. To rest of you, I guess I had nothing to say that you really cared about. I could call you all sorts of names and no one would be the wiser. That’s not my style, though.

I haven’t completely left the social media world – my page is still there, everything that was on it has been left up and I have no plans to delete it. It is a snapshot, I guess, and anyone can certainly drop by and take a look at it. I’ve just decided not to play anymore, and there are several reasons why.

The first is that the original reason for the Facebook account was an opportunity to cheaply and easily market the books I’ve written. It was a way to build the “brand” of Rory McClannahan, Writer. I went about building friends – both by asking and accepting just about any request that came my way.

I did the standard sneaky back door type stuff, liking publishers or groups where people who might like what I’m peddling were hanging out.

I encountered some really nice people – mostly other writers – and found some long-lost real friends. I even sold a few books.

The thing about building a “brand” though, is that you have to keep after it. In this rush-rush world of instant communication, if you aren’t seen and heard, you are forgotten. And if you don’t have some new product – in my case books – then you’re just a little sad pushing the same old stuff. Right now, I just don’t have any new books, although I’ve got at least one I hope to have available later this year.

What I found was that the people who were most likely to buy my books went ahead and bought them. Those who weren’t interested probably got annoyed with my posts asking everyone to buy my books and blocked me. Facebook and other social media, at one time, may have been a good place to sell. Those days are long past.

In fact, Facebook’s algorithms are such that any posting you make will only be seen in about 10 percent of your friends’ newsfeeds and generally, they are the same 10 percent of people. I started to feel guilty about posting the same sort of things to these same 10 percent of people who claimed friendship.

At one point, I bought a few ads through Facebook to see what kind of reach and response I would get. The results were telling – more than 50,000 people in the US and Great Britain were fed my ads and it resulted in exactly zero sales. The point being that Facebook was contributing very little to sales.

I still felt there is value to social media. Actually, I still do. I want anyone who may have stumbled across any of my books and found they liked them to have an opportunity to interact with me. I love chatting with people and talking about different ideas and such. And while I’ve read horror stories about internet trolls going after writers, I have never had a negative experience. My attitude has been not engage in negative online conversations. I’ve gotten bad reviews, but I’ve never tried to confront the people who wrote them. So that means I should have no complaints, but I do.

Facebook became less about selling books and marketing and establishing Brand Rory than about lurking about and seeing what crazy stuff friends would post. I know that I even posted things that interested me and seemingly no one else. I noticed, though, that I would never see some of my friends in my news feed and I would go to their pages, like everything they posted and hope they would turn up more often in my news feed. The effect is that I would get everything they would post and someone else would drop off.

Another thing I noticed was the increased polarization and politicization of what my friends were posting. I never knew that I was familiar with so many extremists on both the left and the right, although I suppose on each side the feeling is probably along the lines of who is right and who is wrong. Along with that came an attitude that disagreement was discouraged and those with opposing viewpoints are shamed. And with shaming comes the inevitable backlash.

You may find yourself not wanting to get drawn into an old-school online flame war, but social media makes it easy to do, even if you are simply trying to correct false information. Next thing you know, your “friends” are calling you names. So much for civil discourse. As I said, I rarely jumped into these arguments. No one really cares or wants to hear what I think about gay marriage, fracking, race relations or anything else for that matter. To tell the truth, I don’t much care for anything anyone else posts on social media, either, unless I agree with it. That kind of scares me, that's not the kind of person I want to be.

I found myself blocking those of my friends who liked to get into these political arguments and some of them I’ve even unfriended. (Why wouldn’t I when this person said all of the people of one political persuasion – of which I belong – are evil? I suppose if I’m evil, this person wouldn’t really want to be my friend anyway.)  Who has the time to scan through unwanted and extremist posts filled with misinformation and guaranteed to make me angry?

And that my friends is the problem. I had fallen into my own echo chamber, only willing to hear want I wanted to hear, read what I wanted to read and believe what I knew to be true. That’s not the kind of person I want to be. I want to hear diversity of opinion, I want to read different ideas and remain open-minded to new experiences and ways of thinking. But I also want to hear these ideas from people who aren’t screaming at me or trying to make me feel as though buying a chicken sandwich is a blow to gay rights. Or that the only way to support the “American way of life” is by buying that same chicken sandwich.

We have many problems in this world, which isn’t any different than any other time in history. The difference is that we now have instant communication across vast geographic distances. And as those barriers have been pulled, we find that – in general – we just don’t get along with each other very well.

So. I’ve hung up on the social media stuff for a while. I will miss the cat videos and pictures of new babies and jokes and quick notes to say hello. Hopefully, those who really want to say hello will still do so through other forms of communication. It will still be easy to get in contact with me. As for the length of this self-imposed exile? I don’t know. It’s been a couple of days now and I’m finding myself more engaged in the world around me instead of the virtual one. I kind of like that. I’m reading different things and I’m getting a lot done on projects I need to finish.

I’m already feeling better about myself.