I go through cycles of having an interest, and then not having an interest in social media. Twitter and Facebook are the core services that I’m thinking about here. Amongst these services, I’ve given up on Twitter. I no longer engage with anyone in Twitter and the leading edge of loud, noisy chatter has carried on without me. If I do run the Twitter application, it’s mostly to witness some event as it unfolds, like a news source, or to jump on some shame bandwagon when a public figure makes a terrible mess of their lives by saying or doing something stupid.

I am about to give up on Facebook as well. There are many reasons for this renewed effort to leave the system. I am tired of the see-saw polarity between stories. The negative political stories mixed in with the positive reaffirming stories build up a kind of internal mental noise that clouds my day and keeps me from being focused. Another reason to leave is the interface has become somewhat moribund on its own. You can sometimes comment, sometimes not. The only option to express your reactions when it comes to feelings is “Like” and the entire service has become self-balkanized. I have friends and family on Facebook, but out of all of them, I only follow a few and I’ve muted the rest. I don’t really miss the engagement, but always having to think about tailoring my thoughts based on the audience has started to give me fatigue.

I think then that it may be time for me to go back to writing blog posts on my WordPress blog. The blog encourages longer format writing, and I expect that engagement will drop as I won’t be using Facebook. In a lot of ways, it is a kind of social addiction and the only way to break it is to wean off of it. Perhaps cold turkey is not right, but rather cool turkey.

I don’t expect anyone to follow me off of Facebook. I will share my blog posts to Facebook so people can still see what I write, but the engagement will drop off. Feel free to comment on my blog if you wish. Otherwise, that will be that.

On a more technical note, I changed how the stories are shared across systems. The original way was to publish a WordPress entry, which would share to Tumblr, and that would then share to Twitter and Facebook. I have torn that down and set it so that WordPress itself shares to Facebook, Google Plus, Tumblr, and Twitter. It’s a more direct path that doesn’t require people to slog through my Tumblr. I think it’s more direct this way.