The Truth About My Social Media Experience as an Author

I will be blunt. I never thought much of social media. (The old MIT Technology Review cover with Buzz Aldrin's face and, below it, the words "You Promised Me Mars Colonies. Instead I Got Facebook," just barely begins to describe my longtime feeling.) But as an author I was eventually obliged to give it a try.

I found that in spite of the glib advice purveyed by idiots about how you have to get "out there" and, if you must, can achieve something giving it "just ten or fifteen minutes a day!" it is just about impossible to do more than Tweet links to items and keep one's involvement so limited as that. Social media is a real time suck--and I suspect that the heavy usage anyone trying to accomplish something through it cannot easily avoid rewires the brain in unpleasant ways that make the kind of concentration required for any prolonged or serious reading or writing harder, to the point that it should come with a label reading WARNING: PROLONGED USAGE MAY LOBOMOTIZE YOU.

I also found that in spite of the glib advice purveyed by idiots it is a very weak promotional tool. (Indeed, my observations there were the basis for my earlier item about "Why Nothing Ever Seems to Go Viral" from a while back.) I simply did not end up selling more books--while, as the experience recounted above suggests, the time spent there made me less productive in every other way.

The result was that at the very least I could not justify the time I was spending on Twitter-and in the end stopped using it, then canceled my account outright.

I see no evidence that my book sales suffered afterward. And while all things are never equal I think that I have been a healthier, happier, more productive person for giving it up. I will add that in the years since have not felt the slightest temptation to go back.

I suspect that others who similarly abandon the site can say the same.