D. K. Wall 0:01
After last week's musing, in which I may have called social media a cesspool of conflict and secondhand rage, a listener asked a perfectly reasonable question. If it's really that bad, why bother with half-measures, like time-blocking the apps? Why not just delete my social media and walk away for good? Fantastic question. A direct challenge, really. The simple answer, the business answer, is that I'm a writer who needs to sell books. And for all its faults, advertising on social media, particularly Facebook, is one of the most efficient ways I've found to connect my stories with new readers, people who have never heard of me before. Don't get me wrong, nothing on earth beats word of mouth. When a friend tells you they have read a book that they know you'll love, you listen. I cherish every single one of you who trumpets my novels to your friends and family and post about my books on your social media feeds. But I've now sold books in 13 countries. Word of mouth travels, but it doesn't swim across oceans overnight. Advertising does. Not that advertising works on everyone, of course. One commenter on one of my ads declared he would never buy my books. His reasoning? If they were any good, then I wouldn't need to advertise. That one still gives me a good laugh. The hard truth? Unless your last name is King or Grissom or something like that, you're not getting a massive display at the front of the bookstore. Even those legends get bumped for the latest tell-all from an actor, a musician, a politician, or a disgruntled member of the royal family. I am none of those. So like the vast majority of authors, I'm relegated to the shelves deep in the store. And that is if the store even takes a chance on stocking my titles at all. So to sell my books, I have to be the digital equivalent of a sign spinner on a street corner, jumping up and down, hoping someone will slow down and read my name. Then, I have to hope you remember it long enough to type it into a search bar. Those little sponsored images in your feed? That's me spinning my sign hard and fast. But it's more for me. I actually find it rewarding to read the comments. Well, mostly. The guy I mentioned earlier being a classic example in the not department. I reply to questions and comments, even if it's only to say thank you. And yes, that's really me doing the commenting. I also take out the trash. The spammers, the scammers, and the drive-by malcontents. I hide, delete, and block that garbage. So you don't have to see it. You see, the interaction with people who've read my books, or are even just considering reading them, that's fun for me. That's the social part of social media. The part I enjoyed long ago. Before the internet was in everyone's pocket, I was a guy with a finance career. I had an accounting degree, an MBA, and a job that sent me all over the world. It was challenging, rewarding work. At night, in a hotel room in some city I couldn't place without looking at the keycard, I'd scribble stories. Just for me. The idea of being a published author felt as plausible as being a wizard. Almost no one ever saw my scribblings.
3:43
Then, in the early 1990s, I stumbled into a place called Usenet. In case I'm just being old and that means nothing to you, I suggest you imagine a vast building with thousands of empty rooms. Anyone could walk into a room, pen a note to a bulletin board, and leave. Someone else, from a totally different part of the world, could wander into that same room, read the note, and pen a reply. Usenet was invented by academics, and they attached signs to the door of each of those rooms announcing the subject. When you went in, you only penned notes about that topic, or an admin would kick you out. Quite by accident, I found a room for Siberian Huskies. This wasn't a place for academics to discuss canine genealogy. Thanks to the magic of dial-up, regular people like me were crashing the party. We were just Siberian Husky owners, sharing stories about the antics of our goofy, beautiful dogs. For the first time, I could publish my little tales in a place where people actually wanted to read them. I was hooked. Usenet was focused. It created communities. And those rooms meant I wasn't at risk of being dragged into a debate about German shepherds, or, heaven forbid, cats. It was just us and our Huskies. Usenet led to listservs and then to the golden age of blogging, slightly different ways to accomplish the same thing, to create little social arenas for like-minded people to connect. But then the big companies came along and offered to let us use their servers to create rooms on their platforms. Life was good. And then came the invention that poisoned the well. The endless scroll. To make the scroll truly endless, the social media giants knew they couldn't just show you posts from your friends. You'd eventually, gasp, reach the end. And then you might close the app. So they filled the void. Not just with ads, but with anything to keep you scrolling. They showed posts from rooms you didn't even know existed. Their algorithms watched you. Every click, every like, every hesitation as you scrolled past a video. It all went into a database. They learned your appetites, your anxieties, and your biases. And then they built you a personalized, never-ending tunnel of content designed to keep your eyes glued to the screen. We've all been there. That hypnotic flick of a finger on your phone. Minutes become hours. You're not even looking for anything in particular. You're just hoping the next image will provide that tiny hit of dopamine. Quitting feels like leaving the slot machine one pull before the jackpot. To keep you hooked, the giants needed ever more content. They didn't care whether it was true. They just needed words. Lots and lots of words. Like the old TV show, social media became a place where everything was made up, and the facts don't matter. So what's the answer? For me, it isn't abandoning the social, but finding it without plunging into the stream. When I open a social media app, I land on that main feed of temptation just like everyone else. But I force myself to avoid the scroll and go straight to the pages I like. On Facebook, that's mostly author groups to talk shop. On YouTube, I hit my subscriptions to watch a fellow author discuss craft or my favorite tech gurus updating me on ever-changing technology. I choose which rooms I enter within that giant building. I've turned Facebook and YouTube back into Usenet. Okay, fine. I need to strain this analogy a bit. Instead of a simple hallway with signs, the path between rooms is now a rickety log over a canyon, with Pennywise begging me to step off the log and plunge into the river of misinformation. We all float down here. You'll float too. Am I always successful? No, of course not. Sometimes, when I'm balanced on that log, I look down and see something in the raging water. A shiny object. A buried treasure. My feet slip, and I fall. Tumbling head over heels into the swirling current. When I surface, I find myself swimming in the rapids. Flick. Flick. Flick. What can I do when I plunge? Crawl out of the water. Dry myself off. Scale those canyon walls. Rebalance on the log. Because I'm still that sign spinner on the corner, hoping to catch your eye. And then, I visit my quiet little corners of the internet, filled with fellow storytellers and husky lovers. What about you? How do you put the social back in social media? Or have you given up?