How a Professor Took Control of Facebook, Making it into a Tool for Connection and Community Instead of Distraction and Strife

I joined Facebook in the early days. It was 2007, I was a grad student, and I quickly realized its potential for connecting with colleagues in my field all across the world. Overnight, I suddenly became able to keep up and even interact with some of the academic superheroes I previously had only known from within the pages of academic journals. What a thrill!

Shortly after Facebook launched its “groups” function in 2011, I banded together with a few other colleagues to launch groups for my two major academic fields, Buddhist Studies (open to scholars only) and Asian Medicine (open to scholars and practitioners). In the years to follow, I also founded groups for teachers of Asian religions as well as for the “Humane Humanities” initiative launched here on this blog. (Not to mention many other groups for friends and family unrelated to my professional life.)

I understand how old-fashioned this sounds, but try to remember those days. Back then, social media seemed like an amazing new tool around which we could build supportive communities. My scholarly world had email-based discussion boards such as H-Net, but the level of discourse on these platforms was always quite high. People would craft their questions and answers in near publication-quality prose, and these boards were not intended as places for casual questions or observations.

Clearly, others felt the same need as me, since all of the groups that I founded took off immediately. Within a matter of days, there were nearly 1000 members in each. These groups I founded fulfilled their intended purposes wonderfully. How did I discover new documentary films to show my classes semester after semester? Where did I turn for help when I encountered a translation problem in one of my sources? How did I keep up with the innumerable conferences, fellowships, and other opportunities in the field? How was it that when I showed up to a conference in person, I already felt intimately connected with people even though we had never met before? All of it was thanks to the Facebook groups.

So, I can honestly and unironically say that Facebook has been one of the most important factors — perhaps the most — in shaping the social dimensions of my career. Some readers might feel the same about Twitter, but I guess I never adjusted to the rapid-fire status updates model. I do occasionally post my own status updates on Twitter, the Facebook feed, as well as these days on BlueSky, including announcements of new publications, blogs, and some of my travel photography. But, for going beyond memes and engaging in thoughtful, helpful conversations with multiple people, communicating in that format doesn’t work for me. Just speaking personally, it feels overwhelming and stressful to have to keep up with every individual comment as they roll in. I have trouble tracking how any one of them relates to the shape of the conversation as a whole.

The way that Facebook groups works has always been a lot easier for me to see the forest for the trees. Somebody asks a question and people comment on it directly underneath it. Comments are threaded, so it’s always clear who is responding to what. And, most importantly, the whole exchange is preserved all together in one place. That means that if you step away for a few days or weeks, you can come back to the group and easily get caught up. Even after months or years, it is straightforward to keyword search the group archive to find and read an entire conversation.

As the years went by, primarily because of this difference, I never got heavily into the other platforms. For the same reasons, I began noticing that I was using the Facebook feed less and less even while I was relying on the groups more and more. As social media became increasingly politicized over the past decade, I virtually ceased to pay any attention to the feed at all. However, no matter how much chaos and vituperation was taking place outside, Facebook’s groups function has continued to make it easy and pleasurable to engage in intellectually stimulating community-building interactions on the platform.

Let me pause here to say something about how I see the ethics of engaging in social media more generally. I am not a moral purist. I understand my position as a human being living in the 21st-century as fraught with impossible ethical choices. I oppose war, but I am forced by governmental structures to pay taxes that fund the largest military in the world. I care about the environment, but I am forced by the prevailing economic structures to make consumer choices that damage the planet. I want to be kind and make the world a gentler place for all, but I am in many cases forced by the way the world works to play the role of the oppressor. I understand living an ethical life life as an inescapable paradox requiring constant reflection and soul-searching.

Admittedly, no one is forcing me or anyone else to use social media, so it’s a little different than paying taxes. However, its addictive pull on us (particularly for young people) and its transformation of how we interact with each other often does seem like an inescapable tractor beam. At the same time, we all have come to understand and personally experience the many ways that social media has been destructive to democracy, to civil discourse, and to basic human social skills. Facebook has been one of the leading villains in this story, and with Meta’s recent announcements likely presaging a rightward tilt incoming years, it seems poised to continue to play a destructive role in society for the foreseeable future.

Opting out may now be a moral imperative for more pure-minded folks, and I understand and respect that position. But for me, I don’t want to sacrifice the value that I experience from using Facebook to engage with and build community in the ways I have described. I think I can continue to use it for those advantages while also undermining Meta’s attempts to entrap and monetize my attention. I’d like to share with you some steps that I have implemented in order to accomplish that goal. (Please note my assumption for everything that follows is that you are a member of at least one group whose content you value and want to engage with.)

Option 1: Ignore the Feed

The easiest thing to do is to simply ignore the main Facebook feed and only use the groups function. Whenever you launch the app, simply select the Groups button on Facebook’s bottom bar (my screenshots are from iOS, and may appear differently on your device).

Once you press that button, select “posts” on the next screen to only see updates from the groups you follow (screenshot below). Note that, as of the time I am writing this, there are no ads or sponsored content in this groups feed. Also note that you can bookmark this page and make a shortcut to come directly here in the future.

Option 2: Take Control of Your Feed

For a more comprehensive solution, it is also possible for you to exert control over the main Facebook feed itself. This step can be extremely time-consuming, depending on how many people and pages you are friends with or follow. The goal here is to unfollow everyone except for a small handful of friends and organizations whose updates you are actually interested in reading.

One way to do this is to scroll through your feed, selecting the three dots to the right hand side of each post you see (#1 in the screenshot below). Then, select to unfollow the person that wrote it (#2).

(Note that I’m using my good friend Michael Stanley-Baker’s account in the screenshot example just for illustration purposes. I love you Mike, and would never actually unfollow you!)

The second method is to go through your list of friends, open up each one, and unfollow them directly. You can do this by selecting the blue Friends button (#1 in the screenshot below) and then unfollowing (#2).

The downside with either of the methods I have described is that you need to do this process on every single person who appears in your feed. The upside, however, is that when you’re done, you will have a curated feed where you are only seeing posts from people who you truly wish to engage with. In my own case, I put in the time and effort to unfollow most people on my 2500-person friends list nearly a decade ago. Since that time, I have also established a habit of manually unfollowing every person who I become friends right as I am accepting their friend request. Today, my Facebook main feed is still as filled with ads and sponsored content as anyone’s. I find this annoying and it tends to limit how much time I spend scrolling through it. However, when I occasionally do decide to, I am only looking at updates from organizations and people I care about keeping up with.

An Essential Step: Limit Your Notifications

The above methods significantly pare down distractions in order to allow me to concentrate on the content that I care about, which primarily takes place within groups, and also to periodically check for updates from select people and organizations. But, another critical step I have taken in order to prevent Facebook from highjacking my attention is to set the app notifications properly.

This again is a somewhat cumbersome and time-consuming process, but I think the effort is worthwhile in the end. The idea here is to make sure that I am only informed about activity I am highly invested in following. For me, that means no notifications from any individual people, pages, or groups that I don’t manage myself or that I need to know about in real time. (The screenshot below shows what my notifications look like, all of which except the first come from groups I manage.)

Note that when I am saying “notifications” here, I am talking about the in-app notifications at the bottom of the screen. I never let Facebook push notifications of any kind to my phone’s system. (On the iPhone, you disable this by going to the Settings app > Notifications > Facebook and turning off the first toggle button.) This means that I only receive notifications when I make the choice to open the app.

Like I’ve mentioned a few times, these procedures are cumbersome and time-consuming to implement. That, of course, is because Meta has designed this platform to entrap us in a constant barrage of alerts, updates, ads, and other distractions. However, with a little bit of effort, I think it is entirely possible and worthwhile to customize Facebook to serve our interests and our communities. If you implement the strategies I’ve outlined here, you might find that you spend less and less time on Facebook, but that the time you do spend becomes more and more enjoyable.

What do you think? What other steps have you taken to take control of social media and make it work for you?

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