I had a couple of posts on our social media recently that went viral. Or, at least viral-ish. We’re not talking millions of views or anything, but the reach was much farther than usual in my own little corner of the internet.
You probably know this already, but when you post on Instagram, the algorithm starts by showing it to a small percentage of people who already follow you. If your followers engage with it, the Instagram gods expand the reach and show it to more non-followers. That means that over time the distribution of non-followers increases exponentially.
This is the essence of virality, of course. A successful post, by social media standards, doesn’t mean your followers necessarily see it. It’s just targeted to strangers, people with no relationship to you – not even an internet relationship.
In a twist of true irony, one of the recent posts that went viral-ish was on the topic of how we are all consuming way too much information from people we don’t know. When I first posted it, it got some love from familiar followers. I assumed that would be about it, but I noticed that more likes, shares, and comments started coming in. I’ve been creating on social media for long enough this didn’t stir me too much, but I thought it was nice to see. The topic of information overload is one I care deeply and have written about, such as here and here, so it made me happy to know the concept was resonating.
The post kept circulating and, not surprisingly, I started to see more challenging comments. They started off with people just asking more pointed questions about how I was arriving at my conclusions. Reasonable enough. I actually really appreciate the idea of fact checking each other online in this era of misinformation, AI, and anti-intellectualism. I also really appreciate dissenting ideas, especially when presented thoughtfully.
But we all know that social media comment sections aren’t known for thoughtfully presented counter-arguments. And predictably, the comments on this post started to take a turn. There were some that seemed undeniably bot-generated. Then some with distinct and icky tech bro energy. Then some that started to get more personal and degrading.
Mind you, this was a post about how we as humans are consuming a lot more information than we were in the past and it was contributing to overwhelm. Nothing particularly political, personal, or – I thought – controversial. Saying that we are in an era of information over-saturation didn’t seem like it would be such a hot take.
But, as we all well know, just about anything these days is apparently a hot take. Not just a hot take – an apparent personal affront to someone who has a different perspective. Not just a hot take – but an invitation for snideness, insult, and aggressive language. In a culture that feels more divided than ever, it’s almost as if our individual nervous systems are constantly scanning for receptacles for our collective outrage. We are so pent up with tension, moral indignation, and – ultimately – fear, that anything that we scroll past that activates our rawness can become the target.
To be clear, I was lucky in this experience. I realized that had the post been more politically charged or, worse yet, had included a personal anecdote or photo of me, the comments would likely have turned misogynistic, body shaming, and abusive. From vicious commentary to doxing, it’s been well documented what an unsafe place the internet is for women, after all.
What became clear to me as I watched this whole thing play out was that I didn’t give an actual shit about the post reaching more people. Thousands and thousands of people were sharing it, and that didn’t give me any sense of pride, joy, or appreciation. It wasn’t just because of some of the ugliness in the comments. I just noticed that the virality felt hollow. As someone who feels energized and inspired by sharing ideas and writing, I found my feelings interesting.
I had known this on some level, but it became clearer that not only did I not care about saying something interesting to the wider world, but I really didn’t even want to. I’ve been talking for a while now about my own wrestling with social media – feeling kind of like I’m constantly yammering about wanting to quit smoking with a cigarette dangling from my mouth. But this experience helped crystallize that I really only cared about writing for people in my community.
It wasn’t that I didn’t want to be challenged in my thinking or even disapproved of. Those can be hard experiences, of course, but there is a fundamental difference to being questioned or even held accountable by someone in your own community. By community, I simply mean a circle of people who have some level of skin in the game. On social media, that could be as loose a thread as people following your page. Even if it is the weakest form of community, it at least means that someone is engaging with your work and ideas over time – that they have some context for things you say or some sense of you as a human being.
Ideally though, the bonds of a community are even more substantial. It’s people who share some geographic space or resources. It’s people who are aligned around some topic or cause, even if not every topic or cause. It’s people who have shared an experience or simply have to see each other in person at deli or the gas station or the school board meeting.
In The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt talks about how easy it is for kids and teens to mistake the illusory bonds formed online through gaming or social media as equivalent to real-life relationships. To be in actual community with someone, he explains, you have to somehow impact each other. To not just broadcast, but to reciprocate. Ideally, that’s through embodied communication. I think it’s easy for us as adults to miss this distinction too.
Again ironically, it was partly this point that I was making in the viral-ish post – that we have too many (disembodied) voices on our feeds and otherwise in our heads. I’ve explained before that we evolved cognitively to have only about 150 social relationships, a concept called the Dunbar number, and that our poor brains haven’t quite kept pace to taking in and processing the reactions, perspectives, and insults of thousands or millions more than that.
But to step back for a moment, this piece that you’re reading isn’t intended to be about social media specifically. The vast majority of this community – and I do use the word community intentionally here – isn’t so worried about the virality of your content. Some of you are barely on social media (good on you!).
Social media represents just one way in which our attention has been pulled outside of our local communities and immediate relationships, of course. Perhaps it’s been the core driver of this pull, though it might be more accurate to point to capitalism more broadly. It’s been capitalism that tells us that a small “audience” is not enough, that our business and impact need to constantly grow to be relevant or stay alive, that nothing matters unless it’s at scale.
As a result, maybe you too have this idea in your head that what you create or do only matters if it stretches far and wide. Maybe you tell yourself that your work – academic work, healing work, business work – is only successful or impactful if it ‘catches on’ or if it scales. Maybe, even if somewhat unconsciously, you have told yourself it’s not even worth trying (to write, to start a side hustle, to make something, to run for local office) because it won’t really matter in the big picture anyway.
And maybe it won’t matter in the big picture. Hell if I actually know. But maybe it will. It’s hard to say, but one thing I’m recognizing with increasing clarity is that this particular moment in time is calling for us – begging for us – to go smaller.
Maybe that sounds weird when the powers that be feel so, well, big and powerful. But it seems to me that trying to match big with big and shout into the voids hasn’t really done much for us.
I think we might need a hard reset.
What if we got back to the days when we made a shitty ceramic bowl because we enjoyed it and we had fun sending a photo of it to four friends? What if we got back to feeling a sense of satisfaction because we helped our neighbor clear their leaves, not because we started a regional leaf clearing non-profit? What if we got back to asking our trusted friends about letting our kids go to the sleepover, not the opinions of six hundred women in a moms group?
We need to know whose perspectives we actually care about. We found ourselves in this era of self-care that was actually self-righteousness where we were taught that no one else’s opinion or experience really mattered. I think we got there in part because we’d gotten so far away from actual community that it was easy – and maybe important – to block out all the noise. But the reality is that the impact that we have on other people – positive or negative – really does matter.
When we get back to our local communities – and again, that doesn’t have to mean geographic – we get recentered in what we can specifically offer and what we need and can receive. We start to realize that we don’t have to actually be the most creative baker to make a really decent sourdough and we don’t have to reach 20,000 people with our post to help change someone’s mind about something.
I’m hardly the first person to talk about the importance of going local. It’s been the strategy of some really inspiring organizations in the last few years, such as Red, Wine, and Blue, whose focus is on “friend to friend” organizing to fight extremism. But right now I’m not even talking about this idea as a strategy, per se. Or maybe indeed a strategy. But more of a strategy for survival, mental health, and joy.
We lost the plot somehow when things got so loud and dispersed. When every interaction went digital. When it became that nothing was enough. We started putting our attention on the big and the wide and, at least for some of us, we got convinced that anything smaller wasn’t important or worth doing. It’s part of the modern tragedy.
But if there’s ever been a time when it was more vital to do the things that we love, that we are good at, to let other people in our real lives benefit from them – well, I don’t know when that might have been. I’m pretty sure it’s right now.
It’s one of the reasons that I’ve been saying for the last year or so that I’m continuing to write here in this space a lot more than for social media. I don’t particularly need Albert from Malta telling me what a dumb bitch I am based on one post. But what’s equally true is that I don’t particularly need Sarah from Portland telling me how brilliant I am based on one post either. Neither have any context for it. Neither are living and breathing and embodied in the community I am trying to build.
The truth is that having a small community – whether that means a handful of people who read your work or receive your muffins or listen to your song or come to your meetup – is actually quite big enough. It’s big enough to mean you are impacting people, ones with real hearts and minds, which remains fundamental to meaning and to community for us as humans. It’s big enough to mean your contributions matter. And they do.
