I’ve been away from Facebook Mobile and Instagram since the year started, and I must say that I’m really liking it a lot.
It’s not like I’ve quit these apps cold turkey; I’ve just decided that I don’t want them to be with me (on my phone) everywhere I go.
And contrary to my initial expectations since starting this, I’ve found very little pressure to be reachable (friends who need to reach me know how to contact me), and stay in the loop (I don’t really care about the latest trends and celebrity news).
If there’s anything that I “miss”, it would be the convenience in sharing updates, photos, and thoughts almost immediately.
This is why I’ve decided to kick it old school and go the blog-route (again). Here are four reasons:
- I want to “produce” more than I “consume” – social media apps help you share content in a breeze, but they also make it much easier to consume content. And my observation is that we are more likely to do the latter. Whereas, a blog forces you to be a content creator, a writer, a participant. It hardly makes any sense to create a WordPress account or host a blog just to be a “lurker.”
- I want to be more mindful of what I share online – blogs require you to think clearly, write clearly, and make a few edits before hitting the publish button. By its very nature, keeping a blog forces you to ask, “Does it really make sense to write about this, share this, rant about this?” Here’s the question put another way: “Wow, this meal is plated really well, but do I really need to have a dedicated post for this?”
- I want to have more control over my content and how it is shown – I recall the pre-Facebook era and remember the joyful (but tedious!) task of changing blog layouts, picking colors, and playing around with image sizes when embedding them on posts. I know there are different publishing options on existing social media apps, but ultimately I’m a hostage to their control. If Instagram decides one day to just show photos in black and white, or charge you $1/month, what can you do about it? (This is also why I think traditional blogs are about to swing back in style.)
- I want readers to “opt-in” – Whenever you sign in to Facebook or Instagram, you’re immediately shown a feed. Your friends’ posts are shown in a layout and order that’s determined by an algorithm. If you don’t like a post or annoyed at someone who floods your feed, you have to unfollow them. It’s an opt-out mechanism. Blogs are the reverse. You have to type in a URL or subscribe to a newsletter. And while you can certainly access them through a feed (like Feedly or other RSS aggregators), that is not the primary and only way to access someone’s content.
So there it is. To be clear, this is not some war against Facebook, Instagram, or other social media apps (I’m still on Twitter.) This is an effort to redeem my precious time. I want to do more with it. I don’t want to mindlessly and endlessly curate a Facebook Timeline, and forget to care about mine in the real world. That’s what really counts.
Let’s see where this goes.