On Social Media – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane
This week, some thoughts on the divestment of our social media attention and why I choose to use different platforms for different sorts of messages.
I’ve been an active social media user since May 2008 when I created my Facebook account at the young age of 15 years old. I remember not being sure what to expect from Facebook when I opened my account, yet my Mom opened her own account at the same time as me and we jumped into it together. I see the big turning point in my time on Facebook as 9 October 2016, the night of the 2nd Presidential Debate that year. Leading up to 2016 I’d gotten a reputation among many friends that was voiced by my London flatmates in 2015 that if they wanted to get an idea of what was going on they’d look at my Facebook to see what news stories I’d posted that day. Yet after that second debate, I noticed a significant drop off of people who were interacting with my posts about the news, and in the years since the overall interaction level hasn’t picked up again since even as I’ve connected with more people on that website.
Today I have 10 social media accounts on Facebook, Twitter,[1] Instagram, LinkedIn, Reddit, YouTube, Mastodon, Threads, Snapchat, and BlueSky. I also have 8 professional accounts of a similar vein to social media on Research Gate, Academia.edu, the Knowledge Commons, BE Press, and on the fora hosted by the Linnean Society, History of Science Society, and the American Historical Association. Traditionally, my professional and personal social media activity was shared on the same accounts; I’d post about the Cubs and my research on Twitter, a longtime home of academia online, yet in the past year I’ve begun to rework things a bit. Today, I use BlueSky for my professional social networking within academia.
Facebook feels like the daily broadsheet of my online presence; it’s my original foray into social media and where I have 17 years of posts up and online. Yet today Instagram is where I am most active socially. There’s been a notable migration of my fellow millennials away from Facebook toward Instagram in the last decade, and whereas readership of my Facebook is restricted to my Facebook friends only I’ve allowed my Instagram profile to remain open to the public. This probably caused me some trouble when I was teaching the middle schoolers in the Fall 2023 semester, and today many of them still regularly view my Instagram stories. What I decided to do was rather than censor myself and limit their access to my Instagram, I would instead take a more curatorial role and be mindful of what I shared on my Instagram stories, making sure it was appropriate and thought-provoking for them. My Snapchat account is the most limited of all my social media accounts: I only accept connection requests from relatives and a very small number of friends there. I still occasionally browse Reddit, especially the Star Trek subreddits, but in the last 6 months I found it was becoming less enjoyable to read and today I only really open that app when I need to do something but am not in the mood to read a book or a magazine. Meanwhile, I’ve only recently begun feeling comfortable posting comments to YouTube videos, I had a handful of very bad experiences doing this in my early years of public comment fora on sites like that of the Kansas City Star and Trip Advisor where I learned quickly that a lot of people take the anonymity of the Internet as permission to be uncivil.[2] As with any place for public comment whether online or in the real world, I try to keep to the principle of only saying something if I feel it’ll contribute to the conversation.
As for the newcomers: like many others I opened a Mastodon account in 2022, and like many others I quickly found Mastodon to be unnecessarily confusing and haven’t opened the app in at least a year. Threads holds some potential in my mind, though like Mastodon I barely use it. I opened my BlueSky account in November 2024 when I was at the History of Science Society conference in Mérida described in Season 4 of the Wednesday Blog, and began connecting with other academics. I decided from Day 1 to cultivate my Blue Sky account as a purely professional account without any hobbies or personal anecdotes. This has limited how much I use the app, though I do use it on occasion.
On the topic of the Wednesday Blog I have an automatic distribution set up with Facebook, LinkedIn, and Threads, and I manually post each week’s blog post on Instagram and Twitter. Because this isn’t necessarily an academic venture I don’t promote this publication on Blue Sky. There’s also a Wednesday Blog Patreon, which you can join for $5 per month!
One of the big conversations of today is whether to close our social media accounts as the corporations who own these sites are increasingly accepting the problems they cause in our society, in the lived world, yet have dropped the mask of caring and continue their play for greater profits bare-faced and defiant in exposing themselves. In the aftermath of the 2024 Presidential Election I saw an immediate flood of false information appear on my Twitter account, which I wouldn’t have noticed if it didn’t appear among the silent notifications that I get daily over that app from the Kansas City office of the National Weather Service, and the handful of academics and other people I follow who are still on Twitter. With the recent announcement by Meta––the owners of Facebook, Instagram, and Threads––that they would cease their work with third-party fact checkers so as not to upset the new President caused a flood of comments about people dropping their profiles on Meta’s social media sites in protest. I haven’t seen as much false information on there yet, thought I expect it will appear.
I for one have considered shutting down most of my social media profiles off and on since 2016, because I understand and generally agree with all my friends and relatives who’ve done just that. Yet while I see a tremendous utility in these social media sites in allowing me to stay in touch with friends and relatives near and far, I see a far better reason to keep these accounts active: I will not be intimidated into silence by their shifting interest in the public good. I often hear the response to the suggestion that we can still have a reasoned debate between people who disagree being that it’s just not possible with how polarized we are today. That polarization is in large part thanks to social media for pushing forward the loudest and most outrageous voices of today just as the yellow journalists of a century ago did the same.
I had many a Facebook argument in my first decade on the platform, and in some cases, they were the primary way that I ended up interacting with people who I knew from school, college, or beyond on the site. I established a simple rule for comments on my profile: I will only delete a comment, “unfriend” someone, or block another account if they intentionally insult myself or someone else who they are communicating with in the comments on my profile. To date I’ve only blocked two other users. I believe we ought to respect differences of opinion when they are based in fact & reason and that as much as social media has been a tool of disinformation so too we can use it to inform and counter the outright lies being spread on these sites.
Social media truly shrank the globe for me and myriad others. Before I began using Facebook in 2008 while I would watch news broadcasts from beyond the U.S., particularly from the BBC on PBS and BBC America, I still was mostly reliant on handwritten and typed letters being sent by air mail to communicate with anyone beyond this country. Now, I keep in regular communication with friends & relatives on every permanently inhabited continent. I’ve been fortunate to stay in touch with some dear friends of mine who I haven’t seen in nearly a decade or more because of how our lives have led us apart; that contact has been sustained and fulfilled through social media.
Let me conclude with a note of data security. I would rather keep all of my social media accounts active because the risk present in someone else or a bot recreating an account in my name is great enough that I don’t want to risk it. I’ve cultivated this garden, and now I don’t want to see it wither. I’d rather use the tools owned by these corporations that actively support forces, ideas, and people who I disagree with in order to circumvent their power over me. I know that their websites aren’t necessary for me to live, even if they’ve grown to become such an ordinary part of my daily life. Yet I continue to use them as an act of self-expression standing for the ideals that I believe in: curiosity, honesty, hope, and optimism.
[1] I still won’t call it X.
[2] I went through a few different words here first.
Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane 