This is, ultimately, an irony.
I used to write every month here on Medium. I used to have an active blog. I used to follow people and read articles online with little to no filtering. And then I stopped.
The internet has opened the doors for as many people as possible around the world to have access to information. But in such a process, no one actually told us how to filter; turns out information can be as bad as it can be good.
It is common to see new apps for our smartphones every single day and new ways to get the information we want. However, in the process of finding what we seek, we are overwhelmed with content that is far from what we expected to discover, whether because an algorithm failed or because we just randomly came across it. But it is also common to have services that are supposed to filter how we approach the report of each daily information.
What usually happens next is the process of audiences becoming active participants. Nowadays we have multiple ways to share our findings and our thoughts on how the world works depending on the exposure we have and the personal views we form. It’s even possible to protest online and take action in certain ways.
All in all, we’ve made the internet a complete reflection of real life. But we forget it isn’t, at least not as a whole.
For the longest time, there was no excuse for me: I enjoyed sharing online. Whether it was my opinions, passions, or just being on top of the current trends; I would do it all without much thinking, if any. Time passed and with it, life happened, mental health finally kicked me in the face after many years trying to take it down, and I essentially grew older.
In all honesty, I think I was lying to myself about my internet usage. Subconsciously I knew I was doing something wrong, but I would come up with excuses so I wouldn’t overthink it. After all, being online was a path straight to freedom in the days in which all I wanted was to hide from real life, escape reality.
And in that process I was exposed to so many things that when I see articles throwing back to the online culture of the early 2010s, I can’t believe that I was, somehow, a part of it. It’s been so long since I started my online presence.
What exactly was the breaking point?
Besides mental health, I was finishing my university degree and started working too, which meant I had less time to dedicate to the online world; I had an extreme fear of missing out, which ultimately lead me to just consume the content I had in front of a screen without even thinking about it because all I wanted was to catch up with as much information as possible in the least amount of time.
This could be seen as a privileged, first world problem. And it probably was, but it was still a problem for me. It got to the point in which even though I would be so tired of my daily activities, I still felt like I had a responsibility to catch up even if it meant going to sleep later than it already was. I would even use family gatherings, friends’ plans, and any other social situation so I wouldn’t miss out so much.
It got worse when political agents started using online discourses massively, and more and more people like me would go online to voice their opinions, which is democratic until those voices start to spread hate and judgments as if they were facts. I guess we all have done it.
I had this constant itching impulse to start replying to random people with whom I disagreed because they would voice their minds as if they were evidence-based, in a place where anyone could read what they wrote. The biggest problem was that sometimes I also got fooled by articles, tweets, and posts, making me believe something was real when it was not the case; and it wasn’t until I did some research that I understood the whole picture and realized what was a lie and what was the truth. And so what could happen to someone who doesn’t bother to do the bare minimum research? They start taking opinions as facts, spread them, and make them their own political, social, or moral views, which in turn get translated into the real world.
In that process, I realized that I didn’t actually know how to filter the information I was getting. That I was following accounts on social media that weren’t useful [for it] because they cared more about the click-bait than an accurate headline. And ultimately that even I wasn’t contributing in a good way to it with my own content.
This is not to say that I was spreading misinformation or creating click-baits, but rather that I was guilty of two other things:
- Contributing to the online saturation without thinking much about it.
- Falling into traps in order to make my content more relevant, like the excessive usage of hashtags and spamming practices just to be noticed, even if my content wasn’t spamming nor misinforming anyone.
So, I stopped.
I stopped posting especially in the longer forms (like Medium) because in the end it felt like I was only finding excuses to write about anything, instead of wanting to write passionately and about relevant things, even if they were just for me. I stopped using hashtags for the most part because I understood that most of the time social media plays by their own rules and not by the content itself. I stopped following many accounts and reading tons of websites because it was an overload of information; I didn’t (and still don’t) need to be on top of everything to acknowledge that I am in fact informed, I basically need to select my sources, research properly and stick to it. I stopped paying too much attention to most opinions online and — most importantly — taking it personally, not because my opinions are the only ones that matter but because if someone wants to voice theirs then they should be open to being proven wrong and/or to other explanations, as well as to engage in a respectful and deep exchange, which often doesn’t happen.
I stopped many things.
And now I am back, sort of.
This is the ironic part: I am adding yet another post to the unlimited sea of online published content voicing an opinion. And I am also hoping it’s clear throughout the entire text that I am not making facts out of fiction.
I am back with this article only, for now.
I don’t know what’s the path from now on regarding my writing online, and I am not in a rush to figure it out. I just hope whatever it is, it feels right and actually valuable enough to be shared, even if just for me.
In the meantime, I am even considering stopping my active presence online — like a virtual ghost. I might make my social profiles private once and for all, delete all my tweets… Or I might just keep things the way they are. I suppose the pressure is off now: both to see, read, and interact with many and to be seen and read by others.
Note: in this digital era it sort of sucks being in the creative industry like I am, we need some exposure to get jobs, an audience for our pieces… So there you have it, another irony.
Also thanks to my friend Susana Boatto for helping me proofread this post.
