I’ll admit it was hard at first to forgo social media, but I can summarize the entire experience rather briefly: it sucked. After I had modified my initial rules (because without having Facebook or Twitter I apparently resort to clicking through xkcd for hours, yes hours), I found that it wasn’t actually difficult to find other things to fill my time. I was more productive, sure, but incredibly disconnected.
While I wish I had some profound takeaway about how much time I realized I was wasting, how vain and useless it all is, or what I learned about myself when there was nothing else around, I don’t. Maybe I’m not dependent enough in the first place for leaving social media to make much of a difference. More than anything, it was an inconvenience, and I was ready to rejoin the digital world after the week was up, on November 8.
If you’ve been on planet earth this past week, you understand why this was horrible timing.
Every feed on every site I frequented was flooded with opinions on the election, its aftermath, the fighting between the left and the right, the conservatives and liberals. People said what they wanted and “unfriended” any who opposed. Suddenly we all cared about the electoral college, and news stories of bigotry and hatred rolled in along with updates from people emboldened by their fear or pride with the election’s outcome. Every outlet flooded the web with their take like they have flooded our TV screens for the past year, in a torrent of loud polarizing speeches dripping through our news feeds.
Some of it was good, and some of it terrifying.
And after coming into this fresh hell, I slowly retreated back to my luddite world, taking in the new landscape in bits and pieces, until one status update pushed too many buttons and I would close my phone, reevaluate the state of our world, then repeat.
The previous week I had felt disconnected from the world, unable to communicate with my friends. As childish as it may sound, I cherish the Snapchats I get walking to and from class, or knowing what events are happening because a friend marked them as “interested.” Social media is perhaps the greatest experiment in communication that the world has ever known, and I was missing out.
Now, people are posting, with very legitimate reasons, how they feel, but not communicating. Maybe they never have been. Earlier this year, I wrote how the polarization of our political system has been detrimental to our society, and in many ways the results of Trump’s presidency were unavoidable. The tensions stirred by his election, in my opinion, would have also surfaced had Hillary Clinton hit 270 instead.
If you believe what we are experiencing is a result of a vote on November 8th, you have not been paying attention, and if you are not listening to those on the other side of the aisle, the rifts will continue to deepen. Note: Refusing to hold a conversation with the half of the country who voted for Trump is precisely why half of the country voted for Trump.
The oddest thing, perhaps, is that only a week later, it seems the response is not to address the issues, but to go back to business as usual, posting memes and normalizing what has happened. It seems we have taken to heart “agree to disagree,” but in reality, we just agree to ignore the other side.
I refuse to write off the next four years of my life or write off half of the population of this country because I am deeply disappointed with the results of this election season, of this year, and of our country. Time is the most precious thing we have, I suggest we use the next four years wisely.
