I realize there’s no way I can broach this subject without getting flagged as grumpy, disconnected, or otherwise utterly clueless. I therefore feel compelled to tell you: I get social media, I’ve “engaged” in it in one form or another for years, yes, I’ve struggled to comprehend its inner-workings, and I’ve enjoyed its benefits. All that to say, I don’t qualify as the uninformed, unpracticed outsider that wags his finger and spits in derision. I’ll let your Googling do the searching that confirms my disavowal of newbie/outsider status.

That said, I will not claim full expertise. In my experience, with something as malleable and dynamic as social media, the second you become an expert, you’ll drop back to newbie status. Along the way, I’ve made my share of mistakes, most notably using a push/market approach, which for reasons Nathan Lowell outlines, stands little chance of success. Instead, one should engage, at the personal level. When you engage, truly in a socially relevant way, experts advise, people follow you. They become interested in you as a person, and who knows? As a result they might also become interested in your work. Maybe–drum roll…–they might possibly be moved to consider the vague possibility of buying it!

My question, though, is engage with what? Content, the answer comes back, as if in social media anything but cat pictures, baby-doing-silly-things videos, or quickie memes can drive meaningful, engaging interaction.

And that’s my issue. Having people follow you, or click thumbs-up/like/plus-1/favorite your post, or reshare/retweet your content, or even toss back the occasional (and rare!) “hey, that’s interesting/great/wonderful/amazing/insert-cliché-term-here” response doesn’t equate to meaningful engagement. Not the sort that leads to a person learning about me, and/or me getting to know them better.

Add to this the challenge of meaningful interchange with more than a handful of folks. Can you really maintain enduring, substantial relationships with thousands or even thousands of folks? Compound this further with the limitations of a particular social media channel (short message length, format/legibility, transient duration) to sustain a real discussion, and the engagement Holy Grail turns into more and more of a mythical mirage.

I will not dismiss social media altogether. Particularly (and most effectively, I would say) in Google+, I have joined forces with fellow fiction enthusiasts and writer/author colleagues (and before that, with artists and photographers). Along the way managed to engage in some interesting discussions. I have learned quite a bit, and I count myself richer for the experience. Yet, I must confess that those successes come in sporadic, short-lasting bursts amidst a sea of superficial interaction, or worst, silence.

That word, superficial, best describes the arrowhead of my disenchantment with social media. OK, so a million messages and pictures are flying back and forth, getting echo-repeated every which way. But SO WHAT?. What’s the point? In the grand sum of it, I don’t see much relevance, significance or meaning there. It is noise, and not even white noise one can ignore. Noise cancellation gear need not apply. Engage in it, and that noise will drown out what matters: introspection; reasoned discussion; and in large part, productivity!

Why would we (why do we) trade productivity for superficiality? Perhaps because we are bored. No, drop perhaps altogether. Beyond how it can kill our productivity, from my perspective, social media represents the pandemic of the age:

• That unable to find meaning and significance, we either accept the dull boredom of purposeless life, or we distract ourselves with a cacophony of nothingness;[tweetthis]Are we, with a cacophony of nothingness, distracting ourselves from purposeful living?[/tweetthis]
• That we find it easier and less discomforting to while our precious time away in irrelevance than to deal with the core matters, which, when faced head on, would require change and transformation in our lives.

Where does all this leave me? I am not dropping out. No sense in throwing out the baby with the bath water. But I am not going to waste valuable time and resources on social media either. I will post less frequently from now on—I have in fact started to slash back my time there—and I will focus on matters of consequence. Whether that meets with silence or superficiality is entirely up to you.

#socialmedia that matters: are you out to make some noise or make a point? pic.twitter.com/PZJRNZd9pS

— Eduardo Suastegui (@eduardoauthor) June 5, 2015

If after all that, you still care to check me out on social media, you can find me at one of the following:

• Here on my blog, of course (not exactly social media, but where I’ll invest most of my efforts)
• Google+
• Twitter
• Instagram
• NOPE, not on Facebook (I got that part of my social media strategy right… I think)