First I left Facebook. Then you convinced me that my bottom line depended on my return. Now I'm leaving Twitter.
Here's the inconvenient truth. Social media is fundamentally antisocial. And by that I mean the very architecture of social media does not support prosocial behavior. And when society is under threat of collapse, we all need (now more than ever) to find ways to access those parts of ourselves inclined toward acting in support of the needs of others first.
My mother, Nechama Tec, embarked on the first comprehensive study of the Polish Catholics who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust. In her first book on the subject, When Light Pierced the Darkness, she uncovered some surprising traits shared by most of the hundreds of Righteous Christians she interviewed. Turns out the usual categories by which sociologists would first embark on a comparative analysis of large groups such as religiosity, social strata, gender, etc. seem to have been largely inconsequential. Instead, she found some less obvious deeper qualitative traits that were shared by a majority of these individuals. And one of them was a pre-war established habit of prosocial behavior.
Stop to offer help to someone who appears to be lost, dig into your pockets for some spare change to offer to a homeless person on the street, rearrange your schedule to help a friend who's being discharged from the hospital...
The people who habitually (easily, casually, even unconsciously) consider the needs of others important and interesting just might save us all when the shit hits the fan.
Social media encourages us to look inward, not outward. And it does this for one simple reason.
It's public.
Everything I say to you on Facebook in comments on your posts can be read by a community of people, some we know well and some who we barely know at all. So no matter how altruistic my comment may appear to be there's part of me that knows it may be seen by many others. So let's say you've posted a question like "Does anybody know where I might find a great..." Anyone answering your question with a comment to your post is providing your with potentially useful information while also amplifying their own "brand" by alerting the community at large to their wealth of experience, knowledge not to mention generosity.
Whenever even the tiniest slimmest portion of an interaction between two people is marketing something to the community at large, the conversation is fundamentally corrupted and cannot be used as a tool for mutual understanding and relationship building.
Relationships built on a foundation of advertising and marketing will never satisfy our deep hunger to connect and to trust.
And yet, I'm well aware that for independent artists like myself, Facebook can be a useful tool for the promotion of work. The irony of course is that the algorithms don't support folks who hop on briefly to promote new work, then quickly hop off. No. The algorithms support and encourage us to spend hours each day liking, sharing, commenting on whatever we see. (Because that's their business model. Every like, share, post, comment, etc. is putting money into the pocket of Zuckerberg.)
I don't know what to do, honestly. I'm afraid we are all at a precipice. The evidence would suggest that if we care about social cohesion, we should all decouple from all social media.
In order to support the work I've been doing (particularly toward building community around the performing arts) I've recently launched the RT Inner Circle on Patreon where for a mere $3/month you can join and keep informed on everything. But interestingly, it's been a bit of an uphill slog. So far, I've attracted 10% of my goal. I arrived at my goal by first counting the total number of people -- audience, performers and writers -- who were in some way touched by the Hear Me Out Monologues and the Roland Tec workshops these past two years. I then told myself, I'd be happy if 1/3 of these folks turned around and signed up on Patreon.
Unfortunately I keep hearing from folks that they found my Patreon via Facebook. So, what to do? What to do?
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