Choosing to engage

I hadn't planned on bringing up the Nazi-leaning doting grandmother in this post, but I kept remembering her, and I guess it does relate.

In this case, I did not choose to unfriend her. I replied to one post of hers, and without another word she unfriended me and all of my relatives, include the conservative one who would probably agree with her.

In this case, when I got the friend request I suspected she would be terrible, but I love a lot of her extended family, so I tried it, and she immediately started replying to my posts with defenses of Trump. I did contradict her, continuously but respectfully. Then I saw a post of hers.

It did not exactly praise Trump - it admitted he was gross in a lot of ways - but it drew an analogy that if you are infested you want the guy who will get rid of the infestation, regardless of his personal qualities. It had a lot of stupidity and racism in it, but also, when your analogies are about vermin and extermination, that is Nazi talk, and that's what I told her, actually pretty gently.

Her reaction probably indicates that it didn't help, but if I stand by it because if I am becoming an accidental Nazi, I want to know! If you see me leaning toward fascism or eugenics, you tell me!

And I have in the past gotten warnings about my growing liberalism, and that's cool. I know, actually, but if you are concerned we can talk about that respectfully. Maybe you will still disagree with me, but you will feel better about my motivations or my thought processes. That can be caring.

But then, if you do warn kindly, and they continue to appall you, maybe you need to disconnect.

With the guy I blocked, it was partly to prevent me from being tempted to try again. I had answers for everything he said, but giving them wasn't doing anything.

It was also largely to shoo away his followers with their false equivalencies and drug references.

Ultimately, that is once again a way of avoiding stress, but one where I still have concerns. If I never saw the thoughts of someone who disagreed with me, that would take away a lot of stress. It would also give me a false picture of the world. It would make it very easy for me to start believing very twisted things without having any push back. That would not be good.

The issue I feel emotionally is that I have a strong tendency toward loving other people, and am pretty good about liking people in general. I feel bad when that doesn't work out.

The issue I worry about intellectually is that echo chambers are dangerous. If I cut off all of the people I think are wrong, it increases my isolation and reinforces theirs.

These are not good things.

Keeping contact is not necessarily good either. In the past few years there have been more times when I have paused before retweeting someone or saying things about where I live in the fear that it would expose someone vulnerable to abuse. In addition, seeing people who should know better saying really messed up things makes it really easy for me to just start hating life - mine and everybody else's - and that isn't good.

I don't have any easy answers, but I think it is important to make conscious choices about what we do and how we do it.

I remember a few years ago several school friends getting onto Facebook for the first time, being overwhelmed by all the requests, and backing off. They would often come back, but it was easy to be overwhelmed and not easy to know how to handle it. I often gave advice, and as much as it frequently focused on uses of blocking and muting, it was really more about choosing: what do you want from Facebook? Here are some options.

Personally, I can be a stressful person to follow. I post a lot of news about racism, sexism, and corruption. I think it's important, but I also know it can make me a downer. It can also make you better-informed, but that can be stressful. As strongly as I believe that we have responsibilities to each other, we also each have a responsibility to self.

I read once that the most informed people were those who watched Sunday morning news shows. My news intake correlated to the second-best informed group of people. I tried moving groups, but I found that watching certain politicians lie made my blood boil worse than reading about it. The extra edge in information was not worth the anger. (I get plenty angry as is.)

To helps us think on the topic, I just saw this today: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/08/190827125559.htm

I find the emphasis odd on how the stress of the addiction causes the person to become more addicted, because I thought that was pretty normal, but yes, because social media has different ways of being engaged (chatting, scanning, posting), you can move on to a different part of it when perhaps you would be better off doing something else entirely.

All of which is to say, decide what works for you. There is a "hit" that comes with being on, but is it a good hit? Do you need to call friends instead of seeing them online? Do you need to mute people? Did you know Facebook will allow you to take a 30-day break from someone if you are not sure if you would be better off without them? There are a lot of options.

We can find the best match for us, but we will not automatically stumble onto that. Going by what's automatic means we will follow the algorithms that encourage the activity the social media companies have decided is best for them. You are worth more than that.

Related posts:

https://preparedspork.blogspot.com/2018/10/using-social-media.html