It’s perhaps worth framing this blog post with yesterday’s which can read here if you haven’t read it about talking to strangers.
Listening to the podcast where Andy (Legg) interviewed Dominic O’Hooley I had an epiphany.
Andy obviously has a natural ability to speak to people and to get them to tell stories and facts and histories of themselves that they wouldn’t normally do in public and it was that phenomenon that brought about a realisation on a dog walk the other night.
I’m not sure exactly when I ‘gave up’ social media but it’s at least three or four years ago now and I’ve now had countless encounters with people where they look at me as if I’m some sort of idiot who’s cut himself off from the whole of society.
Listening to the podcast though I remembered one of the main reasons that I decided I’d had enough.
Dominic O’Hooley – Dom is one of my closest friends, but he often does not come across well on social media mostly because he is autistic.
For that reason it's very clear to him just to state what he sees as the facts, he has no social filter which is absolutely in keeping with his autism. What happens when those situations arise is that people who know nothing about him will enter into some horrendous arguments and interchanges which, for everyone involved become utterly pointless and toxic and futile.
I’ve watched this time and time again and not just with Dom.
Worse than that I found myself entering into these type of discussions when people would post a comment on social media for whatever reason and then I would enter back in trying to score points on an electronic medium which has no conscience.
I sat back and tried to way up the positive benefits of being on social media versus the negatives and it turned out that the scales were weighted in the wrong direction by about a million tons.
It has been many years now since I have opened up my computer, logged into social media only to find my heart racing, sweat dripping and my anxiety rising through the roof.
The fact of the matter is that you’re unlikely to be able to build a strong personal relationship with people on social media.
You can converse with people that you already have a strong social relationship with but you are at risk of undermining that relationship because of the sterile nature of text.
Remember when you were texting on your phone to one of your friends and it was misconstrued, that's a billion times worse on social media.
The true journey to success and integration is through dialectic NOT debate. A Dialectic is where two intelligent individuals seek to find the truth through discussion.
It’s almost impossible to achieve that through social media.
Social media becomes like using a loud-hailer in someones ear to try and convince them to change to your view in an argument.
It just doesn’t happen and is never going to happen.
Add to this the anxiety that it causes through fake news and fast sound bites and the environment is just toxic.
It’s not the ideal place to talk to strangers or to find out more about someone who you may or may not decide to respect.
It took the podcast with Dom to remind me how close we are as friends and how much it upset me when I watched him enter into fights on social media with people who didn’t understand him or his circumstances and perhaps where he did not understand them.
If you’re drinking wine or whisky every night and I ask you to stop for a week and you couldn’t; you would consider that you had a problem.
Log out of your social media now and don’t turn it on for a week, I dare you and if you can’t …..
Blog Post Number - 2417
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