The website platform, of course, was Facebook.
At the time THE Facebook, as it was originally called, allowed for students like myself to be able to share bits of data, as well as clue in their friends as to their whereabouts, all the while creating a network of friends, family, and associates that was based in real-time connections and personal life experiences. As it progressed, the qualifications for registering as a member expanded from being a registered higher education co-ed, to simply being able to provide accurate data about oneself. Dropping the article prefix, Facebook saw major attention from the mainstream media when incidents such as the tragic shootings at Virginia Tech in 2007 saw frightened students exchanging information about where to go and what to do in order to be safe, as well as real-time updates regarding the status of the shooter and the victims. CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his team realized very early on, and through situations like the aforementioned, that this creation had the very real potential to become a world-changing digital platform, and capitalized on that potential with little hesitation.
Today, Facebook is a multi-million dollar business, with its stock value hovering above $100 per share. It’s current head count, as of 2015, is well over 1 billion registered users, and with the global population peaking at 7 billion people, we are talking about 1 in 7 individuals with a Facebook account at any given time, in most parts of the world. Because of its unbelievably expansive network, and registration/TOS guidelines that are decidedly far more lax than its previous versions, a member of this social network can create an identity and be involved in digital socialization in whatever ways they see fit. Through Facebook, you can, quite literally, be whomever you want to be, with the capacity to front that identity and your personal beliefs on as many sub-platforms as you are able. And now, with the advent of paid advertising, public pages, and monetized accounts, if you have the capital to do it, you can become a virtual superstar in whichever fields you choose.
Perhaps this is the reason why I stopped using a personal Facebook page. When you stop to look at it, it’s actually pretty terrifying. For the record, and before I go any further, anyone wondering about my public page can rest easy: til I’m convinced otherwise, it’s not going anywhere. However, as of June, 2016, I have decided to stop using Facebook as a direct social network platform. After building a personal page with a total friends list of over 1500 people that lasted for nearly 10 years, I shut down that original account. After taking a few days off from the site completely, I re-registered a new account, with an extremely limited number of friends, and a decidedly different presence. Still, it wasn’t enough to garner the maintenance of my peace of mind, and so, I deactivated that page, and created a completely private, no-friends account with the sole purpose of maintaining an administrator page with which to navigate my public one.
At this point, some of you are wondering why all the hoopla and exhortations over this. Why would I take myself out of this social media phenomenon, and why take time to write a blog about it?
Why, you ask? Well, if you’ve been following my social media presence over the past two years, the answer should come without too much thinking:
Stupid people and racism. Duh. :-).
During my original tenure as a very active Facebook user, I openly admit to [and am thankful for] being able to connect with many people with very little effort. I was able to share my thoughts, my music, and my information with an audience that would have otherwise taken me decades to cultivate, had I tried to do it manually. I was able to keep tabs on friends who weren’t close by or easily reachable by basic transportation. I got to relive memories with buddies from my old school days. And, most importantly, I got to build up my brand as a freelance musician, using Facebook’s various outlets to draw people to my work and keep them tuned in. That, above pretty much all else, was the reason I hung on in the year prior to my canceling my first account. I see now that it was a poor reason, and understand more clearly just how destructive it can be to find such reasons to stay connected to what had become a toxic form of social interaction for me.
Facebook wasn’t an addiction, per se - not for me, anyway - but it had certainly become a vice; one that had worked to destabilize my already highly distractive mental and emotional state. And it was over the last eighteen months that I got to see firsthand just how easily Facebook could make even the most important people in your life turn into complete monsters.
Myself included.
As I said towards the beginning of this post, a primary reason for my quitting Facebook was the racism that, after a certain point, made itself clear to me on a daily basis through my timeline (on the off chance there are readers who don’t do social media, a timeline is a basic live feed of posts and activity taking place within your network of friends on a given platform). It’s one thing to see things like a comment section on a Conservative news blog to get an idea of just how disgusting White America can be when talking about People of Color in various situations; this is par for the course online these days. It’s entirely another to see your childhood friends, people you grew up and played CYO sports with, talk about things like systemic discrimination, economic inequality, racial profiling, police brutality, and the ongoing struggle of marginalized communities with the kind of utter disdain and outright abusive intent that’s usually reserved for the most vicious of KKK leaders (on multiple occasions, I’ve had guys who went to college and played in bands with me call Black protestors ‘morons,’ and poor urban residents ‘animals’).
To be clear, I had kept a conscious arm’s distance away from talking about race in great detail prior to circa 2012-13. In spite of my intersectional existence as a mixed race Colombian adopted into an Irish Roman Catholic family, and all the material provided by that point of reference alone, I kept even my most visceral commentary on world events relegated to an objective, politically based critique. I recently confided in a friend that it was the execution of Troy Davis that began my “wake-up call,” and that the killing of Trayvon Martin solidified my commitment to looking more deeply into just how much racism was plaguing our world, both at home and abroad. What I found, of course, was that so much of our current socioeconomic trends, political divisions, and violent exchanges are deeply, firmly rooted in the prejudices formed through ethnic differences. Still more urgent was the realization that concepts like racial dominance, anti-Blackness, and White Supremacy were oftentimes at the helm of some of the most poignant moments in our recent history.
Through it all, and looking back, my Facebook page, while still promoting my music and keeping in touch with friends, took a turn towards the socially conscious, as I buried myself in news articles, professional research, and identity politics dialogue to find grounding for my newfound awareness. And my friends noticed. All of a sudden, from the shadowy corners of my friends list, people who had never had anything to say about anything else I was posting (including my LGBT/SGL advocacy) were stating outright on my page that not only was I wrong in how I was analyzing these problems, but that my convictions bordered on flat-out betrayal of both my upbringing and my privilege. In a sense, it’s as if they were saying I was lucky to have been raised in such an environment, and that any overtly critical thinking about that might imply I wasn’t grateful for what I had been given.
Seeing it all in hindsight now, I realized I should’ve just told those folks to piss off and stay the fuck out of my mentions or comment threads.
Yet, I engaged them all, arguing, for the most part, with patience and the preening specificity for which I had already become well known. I was met with verbal grenades. Not that I didn’t lob enough of my own, but the assault on my social media with some of the most magnanimous of postings was just shy of what they now call cyberbullying. I realize now that no matter what I may have said or implied, I didn’t deserve half the crap that was expressed to me through this forum, and should have confronted the people responsible for saying those things directly to let them know that they had crossed a line.
Again, all of this because I had now chosen to own the full scope of my identity, and discover just how much race continues to play in to the majority of our everyday lives.
It was several major events involving racially charged bouts of violence in the US on the part of law enforcement that drew everything I was observing to a head. The shooting of Michael Brown, the choking death of Eric Garner, and the questionable passing of Freddie Gray put me in direct opposition to several high-profile users within my network of Facebook friends. I was basically reprimanded like a schoolboy for pointing out that even in the damage caused during the Baltimore riots by residents, you couldn’t bring back the dead or undo the injustices carried out by local police and civic leaders. I was told that an associate of mine was an idiot for expressing how the arrest of violent White criminals (serial killers included) was comparably low-incident versus the patternistic manner in which People of Color are manhandled when being collared for the most petty of nonviolent felonies. And, what I think was the straw that broke the camel’s back, I was literally yelled at by a friend - a Detective - for stating the bare fact that even in the horror brought on by the bombing at the Boston Marathon, the body count was nearly half that of the execution-style killings at a Black Christian church in South Carolina by a young White Supremacist, yet we still had major portions of our population far more willing to express their hatred towards Muslims as opposed to condemning Dylan Roof for his despicable actions; more importantly, that his actions represented centuries of racial violence handed out freely by White Americans since they brought African slaves to cultivate the land they stole and conquered.
Put simply, it had become a shit show, and I’d grown tired of it.
Today, I hold no qualms about not holding back when talking about topics like race and discrimination, because I realize that the reasons I was holding back before stemmed from the kind of backlash I experienced in the final months before I shut down my 1st Facebook page. I was discussing these subjects with the logically false intent of seeking a middle ground, and even when doing that, I was met with a hostility that was not only undeserved, it was totally ignorant. Sadly, though, in restarting a new page in the fall of 2015, I recognized almost immediately that the people with whom I made the more conscious effort to include in my social networking world so as to maintain some sense of sanity were, in some ways, not much better. It was this period that made me realize that if I was to give my convictions a title, “Radical” would not be far off in describing them. I’m not sorry for that, either.
When I was told by a close friend that I was acting “a bit over-zealous” in talking about these subjects, I saw the writing on the wall. Healthy discussions with like-minded friends would turn into unnecessary arguments and text messages. I was hitting my head against a brick wall I had created, and it was making me even more crazy than when I was dealing with my racist former friends. Finally, after making some claims about the recent X-Men movie, the franchise’s culturally appropriative usage of the Holocaust, and having to explain the nuance in what it actually means to appropriate without being directly offensive, I pushed my chair away from my desk, stood up, and probably said something along the lines of: “That’s it. Enough.” Whatever the words were, they were some of the wisest I’ve uttered to myself in a long time.
Within 48 hours of that conversation, I closed my 2nd account, created my administrator account for my public page, and breathed a sigh of relief. No, seriously, it was like “Waiting to Exhale."
As long as this entry already is, I won’t go on boring you with my life after Facebook. One, because as per said entry, this is all literally over an extremely short amount of time. Two, because the whole point of detaching myself from the instant gratification of interpersonal social media is to regain some modicum of what we used to call privacy. Obviously, in keeping my public page open, I will be expressing my thoughts, as well as sharing my music with my followers, but because public pages have become a monetized effort, it’s less likely that what I share will be seen by people unless I promote it, and contrary to popular opinion, I ain’t shelling out monthly coins just so I can get a reaction from somebody when I talk bout redlining or rape culture. Baby boy’s got bills.
What I will say is that I’m convinced that part of the reason I decided to disconnect, in a sense, is because, whether people believe it or not, whether I like it or not, I’m growing up. Whatever it was that made me snap and get rid of this part of my social media identity, it felt alot like someone saying, “Dude, go do something else. You’ve got tons of other important shit on your plate.” And so, I defer to that voice, and look forward to reshaping what it means to be a thirty-something online. I have found that my other platforms, such as Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat, have provided me with a way to express myself in real-time and not be accosted by lemmings who are just looking to be a pain in the ass or are so convinced that I’m wrong they can’t actually hold a decent conversation - this may change, but for now, it’s what it is. For the Nth time, http://facebook.com/pmurraymusic is still up, and anyone on Facebook is welcome to contact me there.
But as it stands, I’m actually excited to see how this all plays out. In some small, unimportant ways, making the choice to get rid of my personal page feels like I did the right thing, and anyone who knows me is well aware that I don’t do that as often as I should. That said, I’ll take the ‘W’ here, and hope that my online future is far more healthy and enjoyable than it has been.
I mean, it can’t get any worse, right?
Put simply, it had become a shit show, and I’d grown tired of it.
Today, I hold no qualms about not holding back when talking about topics like race and discrimination, because I realize that the reasons I was holding back before stemmed from the kind of backlash I experienced in the final months before I shut down my 1st Facebook page. I was discussing these subjects with the logically false intent of seeking a middle ground, and even when doing that, I was met with a hostility that was not only undeserved, it was totally ignorant. Sadly, though, in restarting a new page in the fall of 2015, I recognized almost immediately that the people with whom I made the more conscious effort to include in my social networking world so as to maintain some sense of sanity were, in some ways, not much better. It was this period that made me realize that if I was to give my convictions a title, “Radical” would not be far off in describing them. I’m not sorry for that, either.
When I was told by a close friend that I was acting “a bit over-zealous” in talking about these subjects, I saw the writing on the wall. Healthy discussions with like-minded friends would turn into unnecessary arguments and text messages. I was hitting my head against a brick wall I had created, and it was making me even more crazy than when I was dealing with my racist former friends. Finally, after making some claims about the recent X-Men movie, the franchise’s culturally appropriative usage of the Holocaust, and having to explain the nuance in what it actually means to appropriate without being directly offensive, I pushed my chair away from my desk, stood up, and probably said something along the lines of: “That’s it. Enough.” Whatever the words were, they were some of the wisest I’ve uttered to myself in a long time.
Within 48 hours of that conversation, I closed my 2nd account, created my administrator account for my public page, and breathed a sigh of relief. No, seriously, it was like “Waiting to Exhale."
As long as this entry already is, I won’t go on boring you with my life after Facebook. One, because as per said entry, this is all literally over an extremely short amount of time. Two, because the whole point of detaching myself from the instant gratification of interpersonal social media is to regain some modicum of what we used to call privacy. Obviously, in keeping my public page open, I will be expressing my thoughts, as well as sharing my music with my followers, but because public pages have become a monetized effort, it’s less likely that what I share will be seen by people unless I promote it, and contrary to popular opinion, I ain’t shelling out monthly coins just so I can get a reaction from somebody when I talk bout redlining or rape culture. Baby boy’s got bills.
What I will say is that I’m convinced that part of the reason I decided to disconnect, in a sense, is because, whether people believe it or not, whether I like it or not, I’m growing up. Whatever it was that made me snap and get rid of this part of my social media identity, it felt alot like someone saying, “Dude, go do something else. You’ve got tons of other important shit on your plate.” And so, I defer to that voice, and look forward to reshaping what it means to be a thirty-something online. I have found that my other platforms, such as Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat, have provided me with a way to express myself in real-time and not be accosted by lemmings who are just looking to be a pain in the ass or are so convinced that I’m wrong they can’t actually hold a decent conversation - this may change, but for now, it’s what it is. For the Nth time, http://facebook.com/pmurraymusic is still up, and anyone on Facebook is welcome to contact me there.
But as it stands, I’m actually excited to see how this all plays out. In some small, unimportant ways, making the choice to get rid of my personal page feels like I did the right thing, and anyone who knows me is well aware that I don’t do that as often as I should. That said, I’ll take the ‘W’ here, and hope that my online future is far more healthy and enjoyable than it has been.
I mean, it can’t get any worse, right?
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