The faux social interactions of social media

I just finished reading Cal Newport’s book Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World, which is excellent: Highly recommended.

One point the book makes is that the faux social interactions of social media—clicking “likes” or whatever—produce a limited subset of the effects in your brain of having actual social interactions. You feel like you’ve connected with someone and they feel like they’ve gotten some social support, but it’s largely a sham: Neither of you gains the real benefits of having an actual social connection. But since you feel as if you have, your impulse to make real connections with people is reduced.

The material presented in the book was convincing enough that I’ve decided to pare down my faux social interactions, starting with two changes.

First, I’m going to largely quit clicking “like” on posts. This doesn’t mean that I don’t like them (or that I don’t like you). It just means that I’m trying to deprioritize faux social interactions in favor of real ones.

Second, I’ve removed the Facebook bookmark from the list of tabs I keep open all the time. I’m not deleting my Facebook account, nor am I avoiding all Facebook interactions, but I’m no longer going to have a Facebook tab open all the time.

I’ll still open Facebook from time to time—perhaps as often as daily—because so many people use it as their primary way to keep in touch. But it’s never been a good way to keep in touch with me (I use it primarily as a way to share links to blog posts like this one), and it’s about to get worse.

This is not going to be the end of the changes I make to start favoring genuine social interactions over fake ones—I want to write a longer post about my reactions to the Digital Minimalism book—but I wanted to mention this now (and share this post on Facebook) in case people would otherwise be puzzled by the changes they see in my behavior.