Shouting down a well

So, I deleted my Facebook account the other day - not deactivated, suspended, or whatever but full-on deleted. It take thirty days to take effect, and if I log in it gets canceled (not a problem of that happening), but soon that facet of my social media identity will be no more. Good riddance to bad toxicity.

I am still active on Twitter. I think I have a decently curated feed that keeps me informed through links to important news stories and offers some decent analysis. I was looking at my profile the other day, and it said that I had all of 79 followers, so clearly I am much more a consumer of tweets than a provider.

I thought about what it would take to become a real Twitter celebrity with thousands of followers - how much to tweet, what to tweet so that you get retweeted - there must be a strategy - and then I asked myself why would you want to be a Twitter celebrity? I didn't have a good answer right away, and still don't. I think there's something about needing that affirmation if you're going to participate at all - I mean, why be one of the crowd when you can be one of the stars? But I don't think I really want to be a star, either.

About that same time, something on Titter caught my eye and I wanted to bring it to an internet buddy's attention, but I couldn't find him - no Twitter profile, no LinkedIn, his blogs shuttered. Another pal tipped me to his activity on GoodReads, so I went there and logged in (turns out I have had an account since 2012) just so I could message him. Looking at my newly-reactivated account I realized that it appeared as though I had been on the site for six years and had read only two books. That wouldn't do, so I spent about an hour culling through my old blog posts, marking off books I had read and linking to the reviews I had written until I had a decent library listed.

Who was I doing that for? No one on GoodReads was going to go looking for my account to judge me, at least no one I knew or cared about. But there was something compelling about the very context of the site - why be there at all if you weren't posting about books you have read?

Why be on Facebook if you aren't going to get likes?

Why be on Twitter if you aren't going to have followers?

For that matter, why write a blog post when your pageviews per day rarely break double digits?

I'm not sure I have the answer, but when I was going through old blog posts to find those book reviews, I realized something: I did a lot of writing back when were all blogging regularly, and some of it was pretty darn good - from the readers' perspective, that is. From the writer's perspective, all of it was worthwhile, at least for the exercise in composition.

So maybe I'll give up the social media sites completely and stick with a blog aggregator for my news - with just BBC and Al Jazeera English, I'm halfway there.

And maybe I'll keep writing this blog, even if I am shouting down a well.