I can use Facebook as a powerful tool for connecting, learning, asking, answering, building social capital, and enhancing my personal and professional goals.
I can also use it as a mind-numbing, cynicism-inducing, never-ending scroll fest that saps productivity and dims my view of humanity and myself.
I’ve experienced both, and I have to consciously monitor myself and experiment with my usage habits and adjust to not get sucked in to the lowlight zone.
These two potential uses of a network aren’t exclusive to digital media. Friends and acquaintances are the same.
Yes, the five people I spend the most time around and all that. But it’s not just who. Like Facebook, what I do and how I frame it matter more. I can scroll through the same feed for the same amount of time and post the same number of characters in Facebook use pattern number one as number two. But the experience is entirely different. I can talk with the same five friends and walk away feeling like I indulged in mind-candy time-killing, or energized, upbeat, and focused.
It comes down to work.
First, I have to enter the interaction with a purpose. I want to learn something, explore something, share something, ask something, and walk away with a specific outcome. That’s work. Then it’s more work to do it, still more to resist distraction, and more to cut if off when I’ve gotten what I need. Oh, and it’s work to take away what I gained and use it.
This requires breaking from the warm, soft, easy, well-worn ruts. It’s easy to mindlessly enter Facebook or a friend circle and wait to be entertained. Take the information as it comes, whatever it is, react to it with the nearest emotion, slap a gut-level comment here and there, do something to make myself look good, and glaze over.
I try to ask myself, “Do I have a specific reason for going to Facebook?”, or, “Do I have a goal with this conversation?” If not, wait until I do.
When I need a goal, I begin to realize that they’re all around me but I ignore them. If I force myself to come up with a specific benefit I could gain from popping on Facebook, I can find ten. There are questions and challenges lurking in the back of my head all the time, and a powerful network of people is one that can help work them out.
It’s not the overuse of Facebook or my circle of friends that’s a problem. It’s underuse. Both are networks too valuable to turn into shiny objects. People used to have to travel or move across the world to be around top-notch people. Now they’re everywhere. If I relegate them to noise, it’s my fault, not theirs.
I try every day to demand more value out of my networks, personal and digital. I won’t get sucked in, nor will I swear them off and retreat to hermitage. I’ll be deliberate.