Social Media Sabbatical

In order to go deeper into what’s important to me, I’m taking a social media sabbatical through at least March.

Technically, I’m supposed to be “platform building” so that I can acquire an agent or build a base for self-publishing, but at this juncture, I don’t even know what platform building means.  The people who use the script with that language, I find mystifying and even more frenetic than myself.   These are the folks who use the words “marketing,” “branding,” “tribe,” and a whole slew of terms that I have tried my best to connect with, but I can’t for the life of me wrap my head around the disconnect between the life I’m living, and the life they are talking about that exists in social media.

Construct.  Produce a product.  Disconnect.  Market.  No seeming intimate connection with materials or sources.  No substantive discourse, rather, the bulk of the conversation revolves around product.  Just product production (a.k.a. my story) and marketing, measured in sales, followers, and surveys.

Everyone and everything is an economic construct, that’s a reality.  But I have already lived an extreme version of that reality, and that’s the purpose of my living in the middle of nowhere, to get myself into something bigger than consumerism’s one dimensionality.  Sex is the most ubiquitous product for consumerism run amok, no matter how banally packaged.  In my mind, everything else seems child’s play, and extraordinarily obtuse.  But that’s an excess of unkind experience speaking, and not necessarily a good thing.

Yes, we are all hemmed in by economics, but isn’t living life well determining how we will define our economic decisions, instead of letting economic forces define us, over and above all else?

Also, I’m hearing too much noise on social media.  Either I’m getting more neurotic, or the stridency and one dimensionality oozing from the interwebs is getting exponentially worse, a rapacious Godzilla of opinion and policing that I find myself too easily participating in and contributing to, and I seem always to offer the contrary opinion.

Perhaps that’s the neurosis.  Doesn’t matter.  At this time, social media isn’t where I need to be.  Following my inner GPS, I deactivated my personal account, and may or may not be back.  My author page will be used only for blog updates until I understand “platform building” a little better.

Relieved of my innate tendency for over sharing, I’ve returned to things that are necessary and important, explored areas I’ve left aside, gained clarity, and done some good work.  I’ve returned to myself in unexpected ways, journeys that at I am not sharing now that the social media over -sharing animal has been tamed for a time.

Because what’s important isn’t the construct we create on social media, it’s giving more quality space to creating a beautiful life, one consciously lived in rhythm and color.

Social media may or may not be part of that life, in the future.

 

 

 

5 Replies to “Social Media Sabbatical”

    1. You’re welcome and that is very good to know.

      Have you considered using a Twitter account exclusively to tweet little segments of the writing you’re doing? Or #microstories?

  1. That’s a great idea, Lee. I have a Julia Haris account, for the “platform” that has been mostly inactive, that I should start utilizing as a force of habit, in order to gradually build things.

    Thanks for the nudge. Really, having this cadre of social media friends support me has been a treasure — and I’m incredibly grateful.

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