How to keep your sanity in the social media realm

By Gonzalo López Martí – Creative director, etc./LMMiami.com

• The prophecy Jorge Luis Borges masterfully enunciated in his short story El Aleph (Buenos Aires, 1945) pretty much has come true: there’s a window into pretty much the entirety of humankind’s body of knowledge & perception.
• The internet.
• And social media, which are increasingly one and the same.
• In Borges’s imagination, however, the window was a peephole affixed to a wall at some dude’s basement.
• Unbeknownst to him, we actually carry the thing in our pockets these days, consuming over-the-air data with reckless voracity.
• Problem is, sci-fi technology notwithstanding, we are still beholden to ages-old cognitive atavisms.
• These evolutionary traits will linger for a while if we take into account the fact that, as a species, we’ve barely climbed down from trees, to wit:
• Like apes in front of a mirror, most people on social media are talking to themselves.
• Nobody reads anything on social media.
• At best, some people skim.
• They understand what their biases lead them to understand.
• Everything you post on social media will be minced, parsed, taken out of context and possibly used to troll you or someone else.
• Nobody will respond directly to your question or comment on social media: it will be used as a pretext, springboard or platform to forward someone else’s agenda.
• Or to vent petty personal obsessions.
• All the information you obtain from social media is biased, fragmented and, most likely, deliberately doctored.
• Duh.
• Astroturf (fake grassroots movements intentionally designed to mold or mislead public opinion) is not an anomaly on-line.
• An awful lot of content circulating on social media is the spawn of said phenomenon.
• Deleting your tweets, posts, etc every now and then is a good idea.
• Think of it a raking your lawn.
• Clearing the arteries of the interwebs of pesky cholesterol molecules.
• However, there’re people out there who are so addicted to the thing -and evidently have so little responsibilities in life- that actually take SCREENSHOTS from other people’s posts to use them against them in the future as social media blackmail.
• The screenshot blackmail technique applies particularly to private messages.
• The amount of time an individual devotes on social media is inversely proportional to their place in the pecking order.
• Consciously or not these pathological 24/7 lingerers & stalkers are aware of their sad reality: they spend time on social media precisely to heal their wounded self-esteem.
• Most people who spend excessive time social media are extremely lonely.
• And possibly depressed.
• Ignore FOMO (that’d be Fear Of Missing Out)

To be continued