Conundrum de dum: musings on deactivating social media

I deactivated all my social media accounts a couple of months ago. Instagram, Facebook, Bluesky, LinkedIn, the lot. It was in an effort, along with other measures, to get on top of some mental health issues I’ve been dealing with for a while. 

This post isn’t about living with depression though, it’s about the wider conundrums of not being on social media. It has been prompted by receiving a self-published photobook in the post the other day. I had forgotten I had pre-ordered Valleys by Jon Pountney, and when it came I couldn’t work out what it was before I opened the envelope, and I was still slightly baffled for a couple of minutes when I had. I only found out about the publication through Pountney’s Instagram feed, and I am certain that he would have been posting recently that it was due to come out soon, nudging my memory. But I missed this, and would have missed pre-ordering it as well if I’d quit socials much earlier. As much as I haven’t missed not being on Instagram, I will clearly have missed things that I would have been likely to back, such as Valleys. Most of my photobook collection has come through social media word-of-mouth.

This led me to think about sharing details of my own work. I am hoping to have an opinion piece published in a magazine soon, I’m reviewing a book for a journal, and I’m working with a couple of people on an exhibition. Typically, I would be mentioning these on Instagram, LinkedIn, Bluesky and Facebook at times relevant to the different projects. Likewise, if I write something here on my own website, I would also be cross-posting it to steer traffic this way. WordPress stats proves this works—I definitely get more traction if I actively market my writing. And if my posts get reposted or shared by others, my website hit rate increases dramatically. There’s an irony here—I am very aware that as I type this I am largely writing into a void. Very few people regularly visit this website to see if I’ve written something new, and even fewer have the site logged on an RSS feed.

Then there is my photography. Not being on social media has changed both the way I take photographs and the amount I take. There seems little point getting my phone or camera out if I am not sharing the results, unless for a specific research project like Graphic Commons. Even then though, I had started a Graphic Commons dedicated feed on Instagram to help develop my thinking around that project, but I have deleted the account rather than deactivate it because it alone could have tempted me back in. However, that my non-project based photography is largely observations in the everyday aligned to graphic design and visual sociology, not having the focus of posting these images is changing how I engage with my surroundings and what I am drawn to. As a result I’ve realised my absence from social media is actively altering my visual and critical thought processes and how I navigate urban environments. As I weigh up the negatives of Instagram on my mental health now I’ve had some time away, I’m very reluctant to reactivate my account just because of my practice, so I need to ponder how I reengage with this.

Not being on LinkedIn has been interesting. I certainly don’t miss the humble bragging and virtue signalling that is synonymous with the site. But in the past, I have found out things that are happening at work on the platform—things I haven’t heard about through internal work comms! This means I have, in all likelihood, missed out on what is happening outside of the immediacy of my day to day job over the last eight weeks of being away, which has the impact of feeling like I’m being unintentionally ostracised. While I am happier without the quest for the dopamine hit of ‘likes’ forcing me to look at my phone every few hours, or judging myself against other people’s performative posts, it has struck me just how much the site has convinced many that it is an essential part of their work life. This makes it likely that LinkedIn may be the one place I feel forced to return to, albeit with a different mindset, and, as a control mechanism, avoiding downloading the app to my phone.

The thing that has bothered me most about not looking at social media over the last few months though, is the lack of interaction with contacts I have built up over many years. It’s not the people close to home that I miss, because they are still close—it is the whole community of design educators and designers that I have got to know over the last 12 or so years, and I miss that regular engagement. I trust that having formed some meaningful digital relationships with different individuals up and down the country, and internationally, that should I email them out of the blue, they will be receptive. That is different though.

Beyond this, there is the impact on research, and Bluesky, like pre-Musk Twitter, I found an excellent resource for this. That most people with an interest in urbanism that I used to follow on Twitter and that had fed into the development of my own research, jumped ship to Bluesky, made it feel like a purposeful place to be. I am thankful for the fact it is possible to deactivate your account rather than completely delete it, as it means I can dip in as and when a project may demand it.

So, what am I missing by not being on social media at the moment? The conundrum is that I both know and don’t know. I don’t know what I am missing in regard to content, and I am certain I am missing out on things that would be of interest or could be positive for my work or research. But in terms of mental health, the couple of months of absence has been vital to help see me through the worst of a personal situation. Social media was never the root cause of my depression, far from it, but I can now see how it has negatively affected my thought patterns when I had less control over them myself. There is nothing new in this, researchers have been reporting on this issue for years, but I have now experienced it personally.

The other conundrum, of course, is the matter of whether I will return to social media at some point or not? As this is a question I’m asking in a void, if you do see me back there at some point, you are unlikely to have read this anyway.