On Withdrawal from Social Media

In less than twenty four hours my book Platform and Agency: Becoming Who We Are will be released. In an important sense I worked on this book for fifteen years, beginning with my part-time PhD in 2008 and ending with the initial phase of my LLM research in 2023. I feel ambivalent about it in a number of ways. I somehow conspired to rush it despite the fact I worked on it for well over a decade. I let an utterly avoidable crisis of intellectual confidence derail it in the later years of the 2010s. I didn’t get the chance to ask Maggie Archer to write a forward to it. I somehow dropped the ball and agreed to a £35 eBook and £116 hardback which means I wouldn’t buy it myself. Rather than enter a third year of negotiation with the publisher I pushed it over the finish line when it still wasn’t quite in the shape I wanted to get it into. Frankly I needed to move on with my life and completing Platform and Agency enabled me to do it in a whole range of ways.

It still feels like a significant occasion though. It’s my fourth monograph, fifth if you count the second edition of Social Media for Academics which was basically a rewrite from scratch. It’s the tenth book I’ve published overall. This makes it feel less significant in the sense that I’ve released five books in the last five years and the novelty is wearing off. What makes it feel special is that this book, for all its flaws, has a radical originality which other things I’ve written or edited lack. It captures a specific way of making sense of the role of technology in the social world, which I’ve been monomaniacally pursuing ever since I realised how significant bulletin boards were to my teenage years. It offers a genuinely original way of making sense of how platforms influence how we became who we are, including what this process of becoming entails in psychosocial terms. I’ll leave it to readers to decide if it’s useful or interesting. But it’s certainly intellectually unique. It captures what I think is a coherent social ontology underpinning the bizarre range of topics I’ve worked on over the course of my career.

Hence the vague desire to shout about it. Look look I did a book! I did a big theory book! Even if it’s much smaller big book than planned because pragmatism, a concern for my own well-being and the publisher’s reticence meant I dropped a couple of chapters from the plan. I would sincerely like anyone who’s interested to know this book exists so they are more likely to read it. I would like anyone who has expressed curiosity about my research agenda to at least skim the book because it’s the most foundational answer to the question “what do you research?” I’m ever likely to produce. But I realised this evening as I was psyching myself up for a joyless engagement with social media that I don’t want these things enough to reenter the Twittering Machine.

I can see the costs involved in not shouting about this book (or the three papers I’ve had published recently) but I just don’t care enough to want to reactive my Bluesky account or log into Linkedin for the first time in months. I last posted on Linkedin almost six months ago and I’m suddenly wondering if I’ll ever post on it again. Or any other social media for the matter. I just feel such a vivid aversion when I contemplate logging into these platforms again that I’m wondering what, if anything, would prompt me to do it. I feel a precarious sense of clarity about my life (and my work) which the rhythms of social media now appear profoundly threatening to. It feels like standing on the side of a choppy ocean and realising how stupid it would be to dive in even if I felt it might be a useful way to get some exercise. Clearly these are addiction metaphors and I don’t use them in a psychoanalytically naive way. I think my addiction to Twitter was worse than most people’s but social media is nonetheless suffused with addictive behaviour. From the vantage point of retreating from platforms for a couple of years and then entirely leaving them six months ago, they just look profoundly uninviting.

There’s a privilege in escaping the Twittering Machine. I have a fairly widely followed blog that’s been on the internet forever (which increasingly means it shows up in LLM responses amongst other advantages). I know how to write guest blogs for visible platforms even if I don’t do it as much as I should. I’ll be setting up a project blog and podcast imminently which I’m fairly certain someone else will be able to handle the social media for. I get invited to give lots of talks and keynotes, albeit pretty exclusively on the applied side of my work rather than the theoretical stuff I do. I’m securely employed in a place I feel valued and where people listen to me about stuff that I’m interested in. In this sense I’m not suggesting that full withdrawal from social media is a generalisable solution or even the right one for most people. But I wanted to share how I increasingly experience it, in the interests of honesty as someone who spent a big chunk of the 2010s persuading academics to use social media.

I don’t think my argument that you can use social media reflectively was wrong, only that I was naive about how platform incentives made that extremely difficult in practice. Indeed the second edition of Social Media for Academics was an attempt to work this out in real term and steer the debate in a more productive direction. Likewise I now think that my advice in Generative AI for Academics had a similar weakness in that it didn’t consider how LLMs are going to be optimised for engagement over the coming years. I slightly underplayed how difficult higher education makes it to use LLMs reflectively (though the final chapter explores this at length) but much as with social media I think the problem will soon be designed into the platforms rather than something we can circumvent through reflective practice. There are structural reasons why it’s difficult to use platforms without getting sucked into a vortex which makes attention and commitment difficult so sustain. There are certainly gains which can come through their use but everyone still using social media needs to think carefully about whether these outweigh the costs.

There’s something which clarifies when you say ‘no’ to all this. A sense of sharper edges that come from choosing boundaries rather than just letting them emerge.

Such a pretty house
And such a pretty garden
No alarms and no surprises (get me out of here)
No alarms and no surprises (get me out of here)
No alarms and no surprises (get me out of here)
Please