Why I'm Quitting Bookstagram

Oh boy, I think I've finally done with that platform. When I first started my Bookstagram account on New Year's Day 2017, I had sky high hopes of how great it would be. At first it seemed to live up to every single one of them. All the kindred spirits and fellow bookworms seemed to be hanging out over there. Even when I began getting tired with the time consuming nature of producing posts, the pros for staying on seemed to outweigh the cons for such a long time. About two years ago I wrote this blog post about the Drawbacks and Benefits of Bookstagram. Perhaps at that stage I was trying to convince myself to hang in there. 

But I've been wearing myself out, even though I definitely don't post a fraction as often as many other Bookstagrammers do. Are they way more dedicated than I am, or do they simply have more stamina? 

Recently I came across Deep Work, a book by Cal Newport that includes a valuable metric to determine whether we should stick with any social media platform that gives us a headache. Here is my paraphrase of his advice. Just because the platform under scrutiny has an undeniable benefit or two doesn't mean we should automatically embrace it in the herd-like manner humans so often display. If we take time to consider our presence on the platform dispassionately, we may discover a column of negatives stacked up heavily on the opposite side. Yet this towering edifice tends to remain in the dark because our attention is focused like a laser on the few meager benefits. Suddenly, under the illuminating beam of this new light, the sacrifice of jumping off the platform may be well worth making.

My driving motivations come down to two.

1) My initial reason for setting up my flag there in the first place. Having a broader social media presence means that more potential readers will discover me, which is every writer's dream.  

2) I've made several online friends on that platform who are fun to engage with.

Hmm, I think the problems really do outweigh these benefits, excellent as they are. 

Firstly, perhaps our reach is not as extensive as we think. I know I'm not the only person who has noticed the weird inverse phenomenon that as your number of followers increases, your engagement of likes and comments seems to slough off. Some people have suggested that it's all to do with the Instagram algorithms. I've come across theories that Instagram promotes new accounts until the account holder gets hooked, then pulls back. I don't know about that. What my husband suggests makes more sense. He thinks that if friends from afar keep adding new friends, then older ones must inevitably slip off their radar, like beads off a string. It's nothing personal, just that the passage of time takes its toll and we all tend to have our time in the sun before friends move on. 

The tug-of-war nature is getting me down. We expect the best of two opposite worlds from one single platform, but the clash is unreasonable in anyone's books. We want firm, solid, lasting friendships, sometimes with people from way across the globe. Yet we also long to build up followings of 1000s. 

As for my second point, when I put on my Bookstagram persona, I'm not as good a friend as I want to be anyway. I'm not comfortable with the person I become when I'm scrolling Booksta. Over there, because I feel stretched thin, I'm a shallow skimmer of friends' posts which deserve far deeper reads. Then I find loads of misplaced guilt on my shoulders, because I never aimed to be the sort of friend who skim reads excellent content. But if I want to keep up with everyone's posts that I follow, it's inevitable that I can't give each one the focused attention it deserves. There isn't enough time in the day. In the half hour I put aside, I would have time for only five or six. And when it comes to making Booksta posts of my own, I get a bit grumpy, grudgingly taking time to condense salient points from blog posts I've already written. If our time for focused attention resembles a well, then too often I feel like I'm sucking mud over there. And that makes me anxious. 

I have no plans to stop blogging here. So if you follow these posts, then rest assured. 

I've spent eight years on Bookstagram. It's not been a flash in the pan. I've had to time to think this through. I'll just pop over occasionally to touch base with the updates of others but not to update myself. I'll try doing without, maybe until the end of the year, and then report back again. Or perhaps the very occasional update without any pretence of scheduling. Hopefully I'll even use the time I would have normally spent doing Bookstagram for more deep reading, engaging with others' blogs and leaving comments there. And I'll be able to get more fiction writing and well-reflected blog posts written. 

We'll see.