How to Disconnect From Social Media but Stay Connected to the World
Social media is terrible and social media is awesome. It floods us with panic news and infuriating hot lines; it also allows us to stay connected with our friends, professionals and news from all over the world. But if you try to drink straight from the fire hose, you will drown or get a violent explosion in your head. The key is figuring out what social media is for – for you – and then getting the other things you want from somewhere else.
Personally, I think Twitter is terrible for news. The information is scattered and often incorrect, and usually it is accompanied by a lot of panic – “THIS IS NOT NORMAL” and the like, as if I would not know that everything is bad if they do not yell at me.
When social media is our only source of news or a source of updates from our friends or links to good essays to read, it really becomes difficult to take a break. You can use Freedom to block Twitter from your phone before 10am (this is a bonus hack by the way; I do it, which is great), but if Twitter is the only place you get news, you can spend your morning worrying about which disrupts the news you’re missing out on, not to mention the dearth of articles to watch on the train to work.
It’s important that your social media channels work for you. On Facebook, you can Unfollow, Unfollow Friends, and Snooze Calls to remove incendiary news users from your feed. On Twitter, you can turn off keywords and accounts. You can also use Tweetdeck to follow short lists instead of the entire feed – if you don’t want to drown in an endless feed, but want to keep up with your real friends or your favorite cute animals, you can just do that.
Once you kick your morning Twitter habit or clear your feed of everyone but your friends and cute animals – or whatever works for you – here’s how to keep up with the world in a way that makes you feel a little less goofy.
Rss feeds
Young guys, pull up a chair. Even before the endless scrolling of social media feeds, one way to get e-news was by using RSS readers, useful tools that aggregated the feeds of our favorite sites and blogs, listing new articles so we could view and determine what we want to read. (And unlike social media feeds, the RSS reader feed had a blessed end.) The best and most beautiful RSS reader is no longer with us (RIP Google Reader), but others still exist. Try Feedly or Inoreader . You will have to spend some time importing the sites you want to subscribe to, but once you have done that, you have a simple list of headers that can be viewed at any time. You can create separate lists for national news, feature stories, blogs, or publications in your area. You can do as much as you want. And it won’t be interspersed with the millions of other things that need your attention on social media.
Push notifications
I know this sounds counterintuitive, but in fact, I found that signing up for push notifications for the latest news made discovering Twitter much less disturbing for me. Instead of scrolling through my timeline wondering what new hell I was going to face, I knew I would receive a push notification on my phone every time a new new portal to hell opens.
Newsletters
If Tinyletters are new blogs, then why not send the news straight to your inbox? You can get the latest headlines from your chosen newspaper or take a weekly tour of a little-known area of interest, curated by an expert in the specified field. Some of them are highly recommended: Vox Sentences , The Washington Post Daily 202 , No Complaints , The Ann Friedman Weekly . (If you have ones that you like, recommend them in the comments!)
Good old fashioned newspapers
Head over to their website and check out the titles! Maybe pay for an online subscription to get paid access (and keep them running). I know it sounds crazy, but this is where news is all about, and when you go beyond the headlines and read a few articles when you are not interested in the flood of other posts, you find that the news can be surprisingly informative. Who knew!
Talk to your friends – everything is fine online
Of course, social media is not only news and reading material, but also a way to stay in touch with our friends. Social contacts on social media may seem insignificant, but they are not insignificant, and if you do not fill the void, you will be left with a void. If you opt out of your feeds, take advantage of the other ways technology allows us to communicate with our friends: gchat, Slack, text messages, whatever. (Please don’t blame me in the comments for being a millennial.)