When it comes to social media, I’ve started embracing digital minimalism and doing a reset.
Coronavirus pushed me into it, especially with all the hysteria and fear playing out across it—and I was making an effort to not look.
When I first tested the waters of indie publishing, everyone was jumping on the social media bandwagon. But it was different then. Social media was a conversation, and you could get noticed as a fiction writer if you could plug into a marketing image.
That’s changed. The companies want us on their sites using social media as much as possible. I watched a Live Event of Cal Newport, who had been sounding the alarm since 2017 about what was happening to us with social media. In the time I took the original workshop, social media went from being a conversation with people to looking for likes to our posts.
It’s all designed to draw us in and keep us there so the companies make money.
So I’ve been reviewing and deleting (where possible) many of my social media accounts. The number of social media that I landed on is shocking! I didn’t realize how much had crept up on me. Many of the accounts were one-time use only:
- Vimeo
- Quora
- Triberr
- Linked in
- Instagram (a 14 day wait, while they continue to send me emails)
- YouTube (Google made this one hard. I had to put my password in three times, and then my email address before it would let me remove this)
- Medium
- Facebook writer’s page (yup, I had one that I never launched)
I also dumped my cache and all my saved passwords and form information. Google does not like this. Any time I log into email, it takes FOUR steps to log in. The nuisance of the extra work is designed to force me to save my password—you know, grease the wheel to make it easier for me to stay on the sites.
Cal Newport’s been running a series on Digital Miniminalism on his blog. You can also read my post for the miniminalist writer. Meanwhile, I’m continuing to delete social media accounts…
Linda Maye Adams 