How do you use social media?
I was an early adopter of social media and have remained consistently engaged—not out of habit, but out of curiosity. My instinct has always been to get in early, understand the mechanics, and decide whether I am using the platform or being used by it. That distinction has become the central tension in my relationship with social media: a sustained negotiation between utility and intrusion.
1. Early Adoption as Inquiry, Not Attachment
From the outset, I approached social platforms as environments to explore rather than as communities to inhabit uncritically. Whether in early blogging spaces like Diaryland in 1999 or later social networks, my interest has been in understanding how they shape communication, identity, and behaviour. I don’t simply join them passively; I interrogate the medium. And yes, I indulge myself as well, like an explorer. This stance has allowed me to step away, deleting the App to give myself a break! I need to recalibrate: determine whether I have lost or gained. Less is more might be my mantra. Self-control something despite what I’m saying, a thing I lack!
2. Selective Withdrawal as Self-Regulation
My use of social media platforms has never been linear. I have repeatedly stepped back when the cognitive or emotional cost outweighs the benefit. Facebook, for example, has at times felt like an assault on attention—so I have removed it entirely for extended periods. Similarly, I have disengaged from Twitter following its decline under Elon Musk. These are not impulsive exits but deliberate acts of control: pruning back noise to preserve clarity.
3. Professional Continuity and Purposeful Use
In contrast, I have maintained a steady, almost quiet quasi-professional commitment to LinkedIn. I joined early and have remained because it serves a defined purpose. I run a global group for swimming coaches, and the platform functions as a professional commons—structured, useful, and largely free of the more corrosive dynamics found elsewhere. Here, social media works for me: it facilitates connection, knowledge exchange, and community without overwhelming my attention.
4. Low-Stakes Consumption and Awareness of Drift
Platforms like Instagram occupy a different space: light, transient, and consciously superficial. I use it as a quick source of humour—stand-up clips, sketches, fragments of entertainment. However, I am acutely aware of how easily this slips into passive consumption. The design is optimised for drift, not depth, and I treat it accordingly—as something to dip into, not dwell within.
5. A Deliberate Shift: Reading Over Scrolling
The most significant change in my relationship with social media has been a conscious pivot away from it. Influenced by the neuroscientist perspectives Rachel Barr PhD—I have adopted a simple but demanding principle: read more books, scroll less.
This has not been cosmetic. It has reshaped my daily life. I now read extensively—200 pages on an ordinary day, 400 when fully engaged. Supported by libraries, second-hand books from World of Books, and AI as a tool for discovery of titles and authors and augmentation, I have replaced fragmented attention with sustained immersion.
Conclusion: Control, Not Consumption
Social media remains a tool—powerful, seductive, and potentially corrosive. I continue to engage with it, but on increasingly strict terms. The risk is not simply distraction and hours lost to its frippery but substitution: that the algorithm deeds endless novelty and displaces original thought, reflection, and imagination. I do demand of it fhe topics that drive my thinking and life: European politics, environmentalism, literature, art, education, neurodiversity and neuroscience, film and video production.
For me, anything addictive (alcohol, sex, food, a new hobby and people) can become a poor substitute for my own inner life – an addiction and indulgence of its own of course. I will spend hours writing up and interpretating dreams.
If I err, I would rather err on the side of reading, writing, and thinking—because that is where meaning, rather than mere stimulation, is made. Which makes me realise: I need to get out more and have friends over. Discussion beats social media any day, in other words, more socialising, less social media! Anyone fancy meeting up :)
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