Lately, I have been getting angry every time I go on social media. It’s something I’ve been noticing across platforms, especially on Instagram. It’s not even over anything big like world affairs or anything particularly political. It’s been about the small stuff, the conflicts in opinion. And mostly it is realising that there are just truths that people don’t want to hear.
Now we all know social media has the intention of keeping you on the platform as long as possible, and we have long since been aware that negative content seems to be the biggest magnet. In this case, the algorithm seems to be pushing the content that makes me rage. I’ve just been unable to stop myself from leaving comments stating my opinion and why I feel the way I do, only to be caught up in what we called back in the day, dog-piling.
There is no discussion. There is no debate. There is just: “you are wrong”, “you have no place saying these things”, “this space isn’t for you, so why are you commenting?”, “go away, you evil person”. Not even so much as a polite “you are entitled to your opinion, so let’s agree to disagree”, just relentless, unhinged hate and degradation.
So what am I going to do about it?
The Logical thing would be not to go on social media. To delete the apps. But as my job is in content creation, it’s not very practical. I need to be aware of the current trends and the ecosystem within the community I intend to serve. Although I will say that after the week I have had on Instagram, the community I intend to serve is niching down at an incredible rate.
So instead, I will take a more productive course of action. As I’ve mentioned, I see a lot of content that goes against my sensibilities and my opinions in terms of parenting and motherhood. In fact, I rarely see content that aligns with my views and beliefs outside of home education content or conservative Christian content (and that’s not to bash those two areas; they have their value). But I do feel that my thoughts and beliefs deserve more secular representation if they are to be accessed by a wider audience.
So with this in mind, I will no longer be consuming social media without creating my own piece of content first. Expressing and sharing the information and advice I have at my disposal, instead of being consumed by the frustration that I feel after viewing certain types of content.
Secondly, I will be reducing the time I spend browsing social media overall. As I say, being a content creator, it is part of my job to keep an eye on what is going on so that I know what to share. But when I get triggered by a frustrating post, it can quickly devolve into doom scrolling, and that is just not productive. Instead, I will be limiting myself to 20-30 minutes 4 times a day. Anytime out with that, if I feel the itch or urge to pick up my phone and scroll social media (because I am human too), I will put my phone away and pull out one of the books that I am studying and encourage myself to read at least a chapter. Honestly, if I had implemented this particular technique sooner, I could probably have gotten so much more reading done over the last year. I’m looking forward to getting through my reading pile.
And lastly, when I truly think about the things that make me angry when I have these interactions on social media, it’s not even necessarily the post itself because I understand that in a short reel or a few slides, it can be hard to get your point across and take into account all of the nuance on the topic. But that is true for the comments as well. It is very hard to express and articulate your opinion in the small text box that is offered to you on Instagram. And when you factor in having small children around you while you are typing, asking you to fill up their juice, it can often lead to you losing parts of your chain of thought, resulting in your comment not being as articulate as you’d like it to be. And as I mentioned, I want to spend less time on social media, so I don’t particularly think it’s a valuable use of my time to be involved in a back-and-forth discussion in the comment section, expressing the same point multiple times to multiple people. With this realisation, I have decided to stop leaving comments on these posts and to instead either integrate them into short-form responses or talk about them at length on my stories or to take them off of Instagram entirely and create a dedicated article, much like I’m doing now.
All of these options would give me the opportunity to express my opinion in opposition to a large number of people at the same time, and in terms of making my opinions into an article, it would give me the space to be able to articulate myself to the full extent, including nuances and any potential resources that might support my opinion.
As for the particular topics that have been rubbing me the wrong way on Instagram, there are too many to list in one post and give a summarised reason as to why I find them frustrating. But rest assured, a series of posts on this website expressing my sentiments on each one.
xoxo
Laura