Social media practice review, July 2024

For some years now I take a look at my own use of social media sometime near the end or start of the year and sometime near the middle of the year. Until now I have usually done so in a Twitter thread, but as of now I am going to try and do so in a Substack post.

In these social media practice reviews I try to describe what I do with social media, consider why I do so, evaluate my reasons, and articulate my own criteria for good practice.

For the past few years I have been active on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Recently I have added Discord.

Facebook

My use of Facebook over the past six months has looked very similar to what it did in the previous six months. I interact with my family (who are spread around the world—currently in South Africa, New Zealand, and Canada) and celebrate significant family events such as birthdays, baptisms, weddings, and the commemoration of deaths. I interact with members of my church (both my local parish, St. Paul’s Bloor Street in Toronto—in particular, our rector, Bishop Jenny Andison, but also some other members and the official parish account—and a selection of folks from the worldwide Anglican Communion—most often, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Bishop of Lesotho, some Anglican Dominicans, and the Community of St. Anselm). And I promote courses taught at my school (the Institute for Christian Studies, an interdisciplinary graduate school where the gospel's message of renewal shapes our pursuit of wisdom, based in Toronto). I also belong to Facebook groups organized around four of my interests: boardgames, evensong, morning prayer, and hiking in the Dolomites.

My primary reason at present for using Facebook as I do is that I want to maintain connections with family and church folks in between the opportunities we have to be together on site. In the case of my family, I only get to be in the same place as my mother, my siblings and their spouses, and my nieces and nephews every 18 to 24 months, and our frequent sharing of pictures and words on Facebook allow us to have a bit of a sense of one another’s lives. We also use WhatsApp to share more privately, and with varying degrees of frequency, use online video platforms to visit. My posting of courses from my school is intended to amplify the efforts of my colleagues who help the right students to find us. I think that these are good reasons for using Facebook and that limiting my use of the platform to these uses protects me from the worst of the damage that the medium has inflicted on the world.

Here are my criteria for my own good social media practice on Facebook:

1. I try to limit my Facebook friending to people with whom I have a direct personal connection through these three communities: family, church, and school. The rare exceptions are personal friends from my childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood. I think of my personal Facebook page as a kind of virtual kitchen table, surrounded by people I know (or would be happy to know) off Facebook.

2. I mostly limit my posting to the celebration of significant events in these three communities: family, church, and school. I don’t keep my posts private, but I don’t post for the attention of people with whom I am not friended on Facebook. I avoid controversy on Facebook, not because I am adverse to difficult conversations, but because I prefer to have such conversations verbally rather than in print or by means of correspondence.

3. I limit the time I invest in Facebook to a few random minutes outside of working hours each day, which allows me to keep up with what the folks in my family, church, and school communities post.

Twitter

My use of Twitter (X, if we must) over the past six months has also looked very similar to what it did in the previous six months, consisting mostly of reading tweets relevant to my work (philosophy and school administration) and my faith (in particular Anglican Christian practice). The elections in South Africa took most of the rest of my attention.

I limit my reading of tweets to those that appear in the various lists I have built for my own use, avoiding the dismal “For you” stream. Of these lists I give most of my attention to a list of accounts that inform or affirm my Anglican Christian faith practice, titled Common Worship. Every year I build a fresh list of folks whose opinions interest me, usually starting with just the half dozen to a dozen accounts with which I had interacted most often in the preceding year, and then randomly adding accounts with whom those folks interact, if I am interested in what they have to say. My current list is, of course, for 2024. Most years some particular issue or event attract my attention, and I build an account around it. Over the past six months that event was the 2024 national and provincial elections in South Africa, which provoked me to start a list for the next set of those elections, Mzansi 2029.

The vast majority of my own tweets were retweets of course promotions for my school. Beyond those, I tweet about my faith practice as an Anglican Christian, usually by quote tweeting something someone else wrote that I found encouraging or worth celebrating. I do tweet about politics, usually in support of one of the issues that animate me: gentle density in urban design, bicycle transportation, market gardening and smallholder farming as a means to alleviate poverty, proportional representation in representative democracies, and Christian social teaching. And, more than on Facebook, I will share something simply because it made me think, laugh, or cry.

My primary reason at present for using Twitter as I do is to catch a glimpse of the thoughts of the people and communities I follow or keep on my lists, so as to inform my own thinking about the concerns I have in common with them. In the case of the Anglican Communion, my Common Worship list has been very helpful in giving me a sense of the worship practices and pressing concerns of Anglicans like myself, especially in Europe and North America. On a few occasions I have learned something in this way that subsequently had profound results in my own faith practice, the most significant of which so far have been my discovery of the Common Worship Daily Prayer podcast presented by the Reverend Catherine Williams and St. Martin’s Voices and of Vida Scudder’s little book Social Teachings of the Christian Year. In the case of the 2024 elections in South Africa, I cannot think of any other way in which I could have aggregated a similar range of information and opinion as that represented by the folks in my Mzansi 2029 list. I am glad South Africans continue to use Twitter in the ways they do, and I lament the poor stewardship of the platform by its current ownership and the n negative consequences of that stewardship for North American journalism.

Here are my criteria for my own good social media practice on Twitter:

1. I limit my attention on Twitter to the accounts I have personally curated into my lists and the handful accounts I follow. This reduces the amount of distraction I suffer, mostly prevents me from doomscrolling and its mental health consequences, and allows Twitter to remain a source of helpful information and worthy opinion for me.

2. My own tweeting receives rather limited attention beyond my promotion of the courses of my school and, perhaps as a result, I have not provoked controversy on Twitter in recent years. I am less adverse to engaging in dialogue on Twitter than on Facebook, but were such dialogue to become vituperative, I would invite my interlocutors to meet in person or through online video, which I believe would be more productive. Since I do not use Twitter to maintain relationships with family, I feel a little less protective over my interactions on Twitter than on Facebook.

3. I invest more time in Twitter than Facebook and Instagram, checking the lists I use during short breaks throughout the day on most days, which allows me to catch glimpses of what my interest me while also allowing me to relax a little from the sustained concentration that my work demands.

Instagram

My use of Instagram over the past six months has again looked quite similar to what it did in the previous six months, consisting mostly of looking at the posts and stories of family and friends and posts about gardens in England and America and about hiking in the Dolomites.

My use of Instagram is otherwise less carefully curated than my use of Facebook and Twitter, although I limit myself to looking at the posts of accounts I follow, ignoring the contents of the feed the platform proposes to me. My own posting on Instagram has become less frequent, as the birth of my grandchildren has shifted my sharing of my own photographs mostly to family groups on WhatsApp.

I enjoy, though, sharing the music to which I listen while working in my Instagram stories, and occasionally someone will tell me that they enjoyed listening to an album I recommended in that way.

Here are my criteria for my own good social media practice on Instagram:

1. Beyond the posts and stories of family I limit my attention on Instagram to beautiful pictures, mostly of gardens and mountain hiking paths.

2. My own Instagram posts celebrates significant family, church, and school events, significant feasts in the Anglican church year, the flowers Danielle and I buy for our apartment, and the Seasons of Yggi, the tree outside our living room window.

3. I look at Instagram whenever I want the lift of a little beauty, and it almost always leaves me a little more delighted and a little more courageous.

Discord

I am new to Discord and at present use it only to nurture academic community at my school. Perhaps I will have reflections on that use in another six months.