Is it possible to ignore social media and yet be part of it?

Social media is the obvious place to let your potential audience know that you are alive and well and being creative. But it’s not as obvious as it was.

The social media platforms are now in total control of your watch time, and your watch time is all that they are interested in. The more you watch, the more you are likely to click on an advertisement that makes the platform richer sell.

They don’t care about you as a viewer, they don’t care that they are stealing your time and attention, that they are filling your brain with dross, that you are hooked and can’t leave, because of all the perceived connections you have made, but that are now made less use to you, because they might distract you from watching.

Social media is not for us any more. We are the meat in the mincer.

I cannot think of anything positive that social media provides me.

As a children’s author, I should be using social media to sell my books, but that means selling to the adults in children’s lives. It doesn’t make sense to me.

The platform will be using me as a free content creator, adding a few more eyeballs for clicks. They don’t offer me anything in return for my hard work.

In fact they are probably using my work to train artificial intelligences to make me redundant – and I’m giving it all to them for free!

In truth, I’m not going to get my posts in front of real children’s book buyers. not like it was once possible. I’m certainly not going to be able to influence kids.

Having a “professional” instagram account means that my feed is filled with how-to-hack instagram marketing reels, as well as the usual dross that I really don’t want to watch but get drawn towards, like a fish chasing a wriggly worm on a hook.

To really get in front of potential buyers, I should be advertising on Amazon, Google and Meta. But that is a whole other rabbit hole. Advertising works on ROI, return on investment. Again, this is a full-time job that takes masses of brain bandwidth, leaving little time for writing.

Eyeballs, watch-time, clicks, likes and analytics, they run our lives.

Once, publishers did all the marketing, allowing writers to write. Now, they won’t take you on without you having already built a significant online presence.

It’s all gone wrong!

I look back to the old days and remember how there was time, less anxiety, less everyone talking about mental health, more real interaction with real people in the moment, in the present, in real time, in real life.

We had fewer sensationalist news reports, because mobile phone footage didn’t exist. Yes, it’s great that injustice is filmed and spread, but we don’t all need to have our heads filled with every disaster that happens anywhere in the world, minute by minute.

As the old philosophical question goes: “If a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound?”

It may do. It may not. You don’t need to know. You have better things to worry about. Better things to take up your time.

I have a silent alarm clock coming today, the start of the fight back, The start of no phone in the bedroom. It won’t be easy. That’s a 17 year habit – but it’s a start – baby steps!