Farewell Facebook. Sort Of.

There's something faintly narcissistic about discussing social media on social media. But I guess we all do it if only to try to understand why, if it has, social media has become such a pervasive part of our lives.

Six years ago when I was still finding my feet in this strange new world I wrote a blog about Twitter. A week is a long time in social media, let alone six years. But I don't think I'd change anything much, other than acknowledge that the character limit is now 280, not 140 as it used to be in the (good) old days. I tried out these Twelve Principles of Responsible Tweeting on a conference I once addressed on the subject of wisdom and pastoral care. They went down well.

At about the same time as a Durham University colleague told me I'd enjoy Twitter (how right she was), my children persuaded me to reactivate my Facebook (henceforth FB) account so that we could all keep in touch, resuscitate old friendships, share holiday snaps and discuss what we'd had for breakfast. Always compliant, I did as they asked. I enjoyed interacting with people I hadn't seen for years as well as making new friends (whatever we think online "friendship" means). I learned a lot from links people posted to broadcasting, newspapers and journals, enjoyed their photos and was often inspired by their blogs.

But I never cared for FB in quite the way I took to Twitter. Twitter was elegant, disciplined and smart. I loved its minimalism - not so minimalist now. FB sprawled without limit (and by heaven don't some people take advantage of that). Twitter was amazingly simple to use, FB labyrinthine in the complexity of its settings (some of which I don't get to this day). But what irritated me most, and still does, is the gossipy world view it often endorses. The endless fripperies, the studied triviality that was once mercifully confined to the privacy of personal relationships are now on view for all the world (well, all our friendship worlds) to see.

It's not that lightening up isn't a very good thing. We should cultivate humour, laughter, lightness of touch, a sense of the absurd. We all need to do it, myself included - ask my family! But somehow, FB seems to inflate it. And that's true at the opposite end of the spectrum as well, where serious commentary (of which there's a great deal on FB - don't misunderstand me) often descends into rudeness, vitriol and rage. The more words I have, the more I can indulge myself in front of the ever-willing audience with which I share my echo-chamber. In that respect, Twitter's tightness imposes some controls. Yes I know that 280 characters, precisely because of that limit, can curtail nuance, inhibit subtlety, make words sound sharper-edged than they are meant to be, offend where no offence was intended. And if you want to abuse someone, Twitter is ideal for it. It will get you noticed. No medium is perfect. But perhaps I've said enough to explain why I've not found FB comparable to Twitter which, most of the time, has been source of enlightenment, stimulus and pleasure.

Social media holds up a mirror to both our best and our worst selves, and to the shades of grey in between which I suppose account for ninety-five percent of ordinary life. The mirror, if it's telling the truth, won't make us look any better than we really are, or worse for that matter. But the question is, precisely what "truth" are we talking about when we gaze dispassionately at the image of ourselves that we portray on social media? I find that an intriguing question to which I don't really know the answer. Some of us want to promote the image of the clown or humourist, others the sage with profound wisdom to impart. Some aspire to be the angry prophet, some the witty flaneur. There's the friend who cultivates triviality in order to subvert (or just take their mind off) the serious stuff out there in the real world or in cyberspace. And there's always the one who wants to be the cleverest person in the room. God forbid any of us might crave that reputation.

To some extent, these caricatures tell both truth and lies. We're all of us tempted to construct false selves online, create the public or semi-public persona we want others to see, may even want to see ourselves. When we draft our social media profile and select images to go with it, what governs those decisions? Some devote a good deal of time to thinking about it, others take a devil-may-care attitude. I suppose personality type has a lot to do with it, as well as the roles we have in our work or public life, and how social media can enhance or detract from them. And all this assumes that we do lhave regard for truthfulness and integrity online so that what you see is, to a greater or lesser extent, what you you get. I assume that everyone who reads this blog believes that this ought to matter to us. But even if it does, it’s easy to deceive ourselves about what the gap between how others see us and what we truly are. That’s no different from everyday life of course. But on social media, as some have found to their cost, that gap can be fatally magnified.

I have to admit that FB is not altogether the life-enhancing medium I thought it might be. But I won't have it said that social media is intrinsically destructive or bad. It's morally neutral, like the invention of the printing-press or telephone, radio and television, all of which were said at the time successfully to corrupt minds and hearts, especially those of the young. Like any communications medium, the internet is only a tool - a hugely powerful one, but a tool for all that. What any tool does is simply to broaden the scope of our capacity for good or evil. As I've said, it's as good or as bad as we are. So the important question to ask always is, how can we make it better for others and ourselves, put wholesome, positive, wise messages out there to help combat so much that's negative and deleterious and bad?

All of which I've written as a way of telling FB friends that I've decided to change the way I use this platform. Hitherto I've posted a lot of stuff about theology, culture, social affairs and politics on my timeline as well as link to some of the best writing on those or other topics that I've come across in my reading. But I've come to think that maybe FB isn't the best medium for doing this, at least not for me. Someone told me, in the nicest possible way but quite firmly, to lighten up on other people's timelines (and there I was, thinking I'd made a helpful contribution to the discussion a friend had begun in a new year's post). Maybe they were trying to tell me that FB isn't the right tool for this sort of thing, or more likely, that I just wasn't using it properly. However, the effect was to make me feel as though I'd lobbed a hand-grenade into the kindergarten playground. Over-sensitive? Maybe. Even probably. But it had the intended effect of making me think about my use of social media.

So I've reached a decision about FaceBook. It's not to suspend my account - at least, not yet (as for closing it down permanently, how to do that has baffled some of the world's greatest minds). But I've decided to use FB purely for social interaction rather than the political, social and theological debates I've been engaging in for the past few years. I'm going to restrict that kind of content to Twitter, and keep FB for what I guess it was meant to do all along, enjoying the fun-stuff with family and friends and sharing more personal joys and sorrows as appropriate. And, I hope, continuing to enlarge the circle of human relationships, some deep, some more casual, that social media is good at promoting. So I've changed all my privacy settings from public to friends only and drastically reduced what anyone can see of my life online.

In some ways it's felt bleak to do this. But it's not the parting of friends, just a new year rearrangement of the digital homes we are inhabiting. I know many of us will go on meeting up on Twitter where lively debates about everything under the sun will continue. And let me emphasise that I'm speaking only for myself and my experience. We each have to come to our own conclusions. But there's no denying that I'll miss many of you in all sorts of ways when it comes to the often controversial discussions we've had and all that I've learned from you.

I'll give it a few weeks to see how it works out. With the public exposure about its policies and practices that it's had in recent weeks, FaceBook's own hour may be coming, though it's too soon to tell if we're on board a sinking ship. It's entirely possible that events conspire to make all of us question the wisdom of continuing to associate ourselves with FB and be manipulated, as we seem to be, by the vast amounts of information it holds about us, and by the inscrutable algorithms that govern what happens to it (and to us).

When Sherlock Holmes was heading for his last encounter with Professor Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls, a meeting he believed could only end in the deaths of them both, he told Dr Watson that he did not think he had ever used his powers of detection other than for the welfare of humanity. I’ll make the more modest claim that on FB, I’m not aware that I’ve ever intended to harm or diminish anyone else, however much we may have disagreed or been passionate about the causes we believe in. That of course is no defence if I’ve hurt anyone or damaged their reputation. But as I say a sort of farewell, I can at least say that I’m sorry. That feels important just now.

#140: Why has Twitter Changed the Rules?

Forget Brexit, that sausage roll and who's going to win Strictly. If there's one thing that's exercising social media at the moment, it's Twitter changing its rules of engagement. As I presume everyone knows, until this year you were limited to 140 characters per tweet. But now they've doubled it to 280. And some of us are grumpy about it.

I've used Twitter since the end of 2011. I blogged about it when I was very new to it and again at the end of my first year on it. Here's what I said when I was starting out.

I've been surprised how I've taken to it.  It feels a bit like discovering photography a few years ago.  Perhaps it's because they are quite similar.  Photography captures the essence of something by putting a frame around it. Composing an image is to limit the viewer's horizons in ways that 'focus' (pun intended) attention so that we see afresh and perhaps gain 'insight'. In the same way, Twitter imposes the discipline of 140 characters which requires us to put a (pretty small) frame around what we want to share and try and communicate in a sharply focused way.

 Someone once spoke of 'the sonnet's narrow room'.  That means the 'given' shape of 14 lines with rhythms that are set: the poet who wants to write a sonnet isn't free to vary its structure.  The challenge of doing something interesting, creative and beautiful inside that 'narrow room' has fascinated poets since Petrarch.  Shakespeare's Sonnets are like Bach's Goldberg Variations: they show the endless variety that is possible at the hands of a master even when the terrain on which to work is no bigger than a pocket handkerchief.

I think Twitter may appeal to people who are miniaturists.  We like the idea that much can be said in a few words.  We value understatement and reticence, where a wealth of meanings can reside at the margins of what is said, implied by nudges and hints rather than stated openly.  'Tell all the truth but tell it slant' said Emily Dickinson, one of the great practitioners of saying much in a small space.  The truth at the centre of Christianity can be expressed in a tweet: The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten Son of God, full of grace and truth.

That has all the zeal that goes with discovering something new. Maybe I was a bit over-enthusiastic then. I hadn't seen how social media can damage people who get addicted to it, or - far worse - become victims of online haters, trolls and bullies. We hadn't heard of fake news. I'm the first to admit that an unregulated cyberspace is dangerous and puts people at risk. And not just the young. Think of Jo Cox and Gina Miller.

Yet for all that, I still believe that used responsibly, social media is an immensely powerful tool for doing good in the world. Twitter in particular had an elegance and succinctness that seemed to command attention. No wonder politicians like Donald Trump were quick to spot its potential. To be able to say something striking (whether true or not, whether wise or not) and reach millions of people in just 140 characters offered an irresistible challenge to anyone who saw the possibilities in vivid, focused communication.

Note the past tense. Because that has now changed for the worse. Open your Twitter feed and what do you find? A never-ending stream of ponderous essays of 280 characters. Your screen is crammed with text. Your eye could just about scan 140 at one go, take in the message, tell your brain that here was something worth thinking about, endorsing with enthusiasm, being grumpy about, disagreeing violently with, smiling at. Here was something had bothered to take the trouble to distil for us. When there is so much information out there clamouring for our attention, we love succinctness. But now Twitter is sprawling like Face Book, clogging up the weirs and culverts so that the flow is turbulent and muddied, and we can no longer quickly tell the difference between what matters and what doesn't.

So what has possessed Twitter to change the rules and double the character limit? We loved the discipline of 140 characters and the sharpness it gave to our writing. Dr Johnson once said to a plodding writer something like, "strike out every other word in what you have written: it will do wonders for your style." As someone who is tempted to use too many adjectives and adverbs, I've found it's been a great reminder to try to write plain English. No, the medium wasn't broke and didn't need fixing. Except in the eyes of those who thought that the more Twitter emulated Face Book, the more popular it would be and the higher the advertising revenues. The trouble is that the 140 "brand" was such a distinctive USP. Maybe adjusting it upwards to 160 would not have mattered too much. But to double it (which is to multiply by 8 its "cubic capacity" - hugely more if in my analogy cyberspace stretches beyond three dimensions) is a big risk.

I was tempted to give up half my character allowance next Lent and stick to 140 for a few weeks - like the Lent a few years ago when I gave up colour photography and worked only in black and white. Then I thought: why wait till Lent? Let's start now. So I am doggedly carrying on in the way I've learned to know and love Twitter by continuing with the 140 limit. I've been encouraged by others who've adopted my suggested #140 hashtag in their Twitter profiles. I know that without a numerical counter on the tweet screen (again, why?) it's not so easy. But all we have to do is to stop writing when the blue line hits the bottom of the circle at the "half-past" mark. Sooner if we can.

I won't be obsessive about #140. If I stray over by a dozen characters, I'm not going to worry. But we want to keep the spirit of Twitter alive. Brevity is not only the soul of wit but the soul of Twitter too. So maybe I can encourage you to give it a go? I'll follow you if you let me know you've put #140 in your profile. There's an offer you can't refuse. I'm at @sadgrovem. I've tweeted @Twitter to say I'd be glad to have their comments and to publish them here. You may want to ask them too.

"Always the supporter of lost causes" I hear you say with a sigh. "Always the remainer." Ah well. Put it down to retirement and having too much time to think. And blog. And tweet.