Can Medium cure my Facebook addiction?
Like millions of other people I check my Facebook and Instagram feeds regularly. When the likes, comments and shares ping away I get a buzz. But the feeling is fleeting. Emotional emptiness sometimes follows my bite-sized bursts of happiness. In my book publishing office I work all day with authors and editors. They must focus. If they don’t the books don’t get written and published at a high level of excellence. There is no instant gratification as it takes a long time from delivering their words to the page to the general public’s feedback. Writers must be patient. Not so with real time social media discourse. At my kitchen table or at my desk the lure of instant connection is a serious distraction. Whether at work or at home I am constantly challenging myself to put down the phone, close out the apps and spend more quality time with my thoughts and actions. The conflict is real as social media is a part of all of our lives and in order to help promote our books social engagement is key. Plus, I revel in the community experience. So I’m caught betwixt and between.
That’s where my experiment with Medium comes in. It’s like a low-carb diet for my sometimes unfocused brain. Rather than perpetually scrolling through very brief glimpses of other people’s posts “liking” many, and commenting on a few, I’m trying to take enforced breaks. I’m consciously trending towards Medium in order to write my way into focus.
More protein, less refined sugar.
When I read my favorite writers such as Harper Lee, Nicole Krauss and Simon Van Booy, I often feel as though I must breathe into a paper bag to keep from hyperventilating. Their sentences make me swoon. They could not possibly have created these incredible works of literature while simultaneously switching back-and-forth between various forms of social media. So why not take pages from their play-books to get proactive with my own writing? No harm in trying to turn what might have been a quick, mindless post, into an exercise in concentrating. The bonus could be focus! In an interview about writing Maya Angelou once said “You have to get to a very quiet place inside yourself” in order to hear yourself think. No kidding.
Before Medium I had not spent a lot of time thinking about writing from a personal growth perspective, or ever considered that it might be just what the doctor ordered. But seeing the green highlighted sentences and thoughtful readers’ comments on stories I have consciously crafted reminds me that the pen or in this case the keyboard could be a great tool for consciously uncoupling from newsfeed addiction.
A recent article stated that people who are less able to concentrate could try something simple to cure their social media driven ADHD. The fix was to sit down and read an actual book! Since reading expands and quiets the mind could writing also work that magic? Medium requires sitting with words, giving them thought over time, sometimes hours and more often days, and concentrating on what’s been written while continuing to revise. It is the writing process, paired by a social media sommelier into an experience that does not give me indigestion. The initial anecdotal evidence reveals turning my mind’s eye to the creative writing process may be a whole lot more than the placebo effect when it comes to curing a disease that’s developed in our age of distraction.
Thank you Medium for providing me the space to grow as a writer and more importantly as a thoughtful person.
