Pocket Change: Social Media Morality

This originally appeared in Pocket Change, my newsletter about disruptive change and transformational leadership. Subscribe here.

I’ve mostly stayed off of social media for the past few months — not because I’m taking any kind of intentional detox, but because I’ve had a hard time figuring out the right role of social for myself, a recovering evangelist about social media’s power who is now increasingly ambivalent about its effects on society.

Chrissy Teigen put it succinctly when she recently quit Twitter: “This no longer serves me as positively as it serves me negatively.” One could apply that logic to the entire social industrial complex, which has an oversized effect on our interpretation of reality.

And yet, social media is playing a key role in distilling down for us some of the most complicated, intersectional social justice issues right now, and surfacing concrete ways we can help: sharing specific ways to support the AAPI community after the rise of targeted hate crimes is one issue friends on Instagram, for example, have helped me follow. I can’t help but see that kind of education and activism as a net good for us.

But what happens when we’re told to care about everything, all the time? We have a danger of becoming paralyzed, feeling like the world is constantly on fire with no hope of change. In “Trick Mirror”, Jia Tolentino’s autobiographical reflection on internet culture, the author talks about the imperative to share in order to exist: the internet is literally a constant presentation of self-identity—but only if you participate. That dynamic not only confuses moral living with communicating about moral living, it makes not communicating that you’re a moral person the same as not being one.

Our brains have not yet caught up with how to process the world’s information that we carry around in our pockets every day, so each of us has to decide when and where we want to plug in and make a difference, and how we share what we believe about the world. I for one am re-focusing on the story I tell myself about who I want to be first, before I worry about telling anyone else.