On Blogging, Part Two.

There is another reason I’ll never make it big as a blogger. Are you ready for this?

I can’t stand social media.

Yep, I said it. While I do spend more time than I’d like on my personal Facebook account (but more on in another post), I don’t tweet, I rarely post on Instagram, Pinterest confuses me, and I don’t even have accounts on the other social media platforms.

Don’t get me wrong, when I started this blog I was all about the social media. I set up a Facebook page for Eat, Write, Run, Repeat!, I opened Twitter and Instagram accounts, and I swore I’d be pinning away like my life depended on it. Annnnd…nothing. If I hadn’t set up my blog posts to automatically post to Twitter and Facebook I’d have absolutely zero tweets or Facebook posts, and I pinned a couple random things to boards before I got, well, bored.

Let me try to explain this. I grew up in a small town, on 30-some acres in the country with no neighbors to speak of. My parents chose not to watch television, so I grew up without it. No, we are not Amish. My parents simply decided that it was a waste of time, neither of them really watched much anyway, and so they decided not to have it when they got married. Best. Decision. Ever. Seriously. Instead of spending our days inside and glued to the television set, my sisters and I grew up climbing trees, playing barefoot in the creek behind our house, riding our bikes up and down the street, and running around like banshees. We set up a chemistry set in one of the barns on our property and pretended to be mad scientists. We created imaginary worlds outdoors. We spent our time in the woods. I spent most of my summers covered in poison ivy. It was awesome.

We didn’t have video games, either. We had a hand-me-down Atari that lasted about three days before it broke, and my dad bought a computer game called “Mad Doc McCree” that drove us crazy until we finally won, but for the most part? It was books, and movies, and some Saturday Morning Cartoons one of our aunts recorded for us every now and then.

There were a few times when I wished we had television. The day after some huge sporting event, for example, when everyone was talking about how so-and-so won the game, or Monday mornings when all my friends came rushing in talking about what happened on Full House, Boy Meets World, and Step by Step on TGIF. And don’t even get me STARTED on The Simpsons. But more often than not I was glad we didn’t have TV. And now here I am, how many years later, and I still don’t have TV. (Aside from a short stint in college, I’ve never had it.) And you know what? I’m better off.

Which brings me back to social media. Perhaps I should have been born in a different era, but I just don’t feel the need to be connected all the time. I think tweets are stupid – I really don’t care about your 140 character status message, or a link to your post, or your ad, or what have you. And when a tweet links me to your facebook post or instagram I want to scream, “Why do you have the same thing in three places?!” Why do we need three different platforms for someone to post the same thing? I sometimes like looking at other people’s pictures on Instagram, but half of them are stupid selfies or friends I don’t know or Crossfit WODs that I don’t care about. (And I’m an Instagram fail myself. I’ve been on Instagram for over a year and I have less than 100 pictures. Over half of them are of food.) If I see another sponsored post or ad on Facebook, I’m going to cancel my account. I just. don’t. care.

I realize that in the past four paragraphs I just turned into your cranky eight-seven year old grandmother shaking my cane and yelling through my toothless gums about the “good old days before technology”*, and I do somewhat apologize for that. If that’s the way I feel about social media and “the world wide web”, I probably shouldn’t even be online, right? Right. But I do enjoy writing, and posting. I just don’t like all the media and promoting and tweeting and pinning and SEO techniques and page hits and whatever else that goes with it. Which is why I will never make it big as a blogger; and probably why, even if I would write the next Hunger Games series, I’ll never make it big as an author. But I do like writing, as I’ve mentioned before, so I’ll just keep doing that. And posting pictures of food on Instagram. And maybe facebook stalking on my personal account.

But the other stuff? Eh, not so much.

 

*Don’t get me wrong, I love technology. I love electricity and running water and email and digital photography and not having to boil water over a fire to cook food or take a bath. I just don’t feel the need to have a running play-by-play of Miley Cyrus’s day via 140 character tweets.