Social media is an extremely useful and important marketing and networking tool for businesses these days—and, of course, Colorado Serenity is no exception to that. We use it to share some of our magazine content and to keep in touch with our advertisers, fans and community in general. However, lately, I’ve come to think of it as a necessary evil.
It seems that the keyboard jockeys, who are so bold in the privacy of their homes, sitting there in their pajamas without fear of actual consequences for their incendiary words, have begun to outnumber those of us who use the internet for business or just personal, light entertainment—you know, fun and pleasure. Remember those days? It’s really unfortunate that so many platforms have taken such a downward spiral into a cyber cesspool.
Of course, the option of scrolling on by the negative stuff or just deleting it is always there, and I’ve been shouting that from the rooftops myself for years. That used to work pretty well because the negative was sprinkled in amongst a much larger percentage of really fun and positive content. Now, it appears the percentages are reversed and the negative far outweighs the positive. Quite frankly, I blame social media for the extreme divisiveness in our country right now—at least partially. Mainstream media gets a lot of the blame as well, but without the rapid-fire spreading of “news” (whether true or not) via social media, I really do believe we could find it easier to be united and it wouldn’t be so hard to find a little understanding and maybe even some common ground.
Maybe there is something to that saying, “An idle brain is the devil’s workshop.” With so many people either working from home by choice or because their companies made that decision for them, or they are simply out of work (and hopefully drawing unemployment), there seems to be many people here in our mountain community who have lots of spare time, and they like to spend much of it on social media. My question is, if that is going to be the case, why not spend it for good—for positive reasons—to spread joy or humor, or at least to communicate helpful information for the community without anything nasty associated with it? (Of course some of that still happens, so please don’t contact me with all your “But what about… ? You know what I’m talking about here.)
With all the mandates that came from COVID-19, how nice would it have been to have had a social media distancing? A figurative mask put over your keyboards. With the nastiness I have seen since all of this started (and it’s just getting worse the closer we get to the election), I just daydream of a social media-free world. I have taken breaks from it myself for days and up to a week at a time and it’s absolutely amazing what it does for your mental health.
I feel lucky that I can choose not to participate in any of the social media platforms for weeks on end, because we have an expert who handles our business page for us, affording me that opportunity to completely unplug if I feel I need to for sanity. I’ve come to embrace the phrase, “ignorance is bliss.”
