I have so much compassion for everyone trying to make it
online right now; it is a confusing landscape. We need to share our stories,
our vulnerabilities with each other and be truly seen by others. It is
beautiful and powerful in the right context. We are wired for
connection. Yet the connection we have created between
vulnerability and marketing really rattles my cage and my nervous
system. I don’t think it is healthy for us to be served with so many
different kinds of energies, information or trauma stories in
interruptive ways throughout our day, in the name of marketing.
Having better boundaries about what and where we share, thinking
more carefully about what we are doing to each other energetically
with our posts is something I would like to see happening more in
Social Media For A New Age: The Next Phase.
We need communication that doesn’t play into an old paradigm of
persuasion and manipulation, and instead look at how to magnetise
the right people to our words, our videos, our podcasts, our courses,
our work in a more wholesome and less invasive way.
I don’t have all the answers, but I am willing to try and unpick some
of the bad habits and social conditioning that has been encouraged
within social media marketing over recent years. It has become a
massive marketplace full of promotion, advertising and attention-
seeking. When you add in all the sponsored posts we see, every
three to four in our timeline (I counted them one morning), there
are a lot of diverse hooks and energies coming up and at us. We
don’t see what all of this is doing to us, every time we tap in.
We zone it out,
We continue to scroll, Energetically exhausting us all.
I know a lot of my friends, clients and contemporaries are feeling a
sense of enough! The push, push, push of so much marketing and
promotion feels relentless within these communication channels,
particularly when it relates to sensitive topics around healing,
mental health and wellbeing. It’s made me question social media as
a whole, my role in it, where I want to go and how I earn a living.
This path is taking me into new realms within social media, where
we begin expanding our awareness of what social media is and
what it can do. Where we see it from both a collective, global view
to an individual human perspective. The macro and the micro. What
unfolded throughout 2018-19 is just the beginning of what I’m sure
will be an eye-opening decade ahead.
Managing fewer social media platforms has ultimately been a gift
and it has given me a much-needed break from ‘ having ’ to be on
multiple accounts for clients all the time. Inspired by Glastonbury
Festival, I decided to take 2019 as a fallow year, a year of rest and
recovery, of research and development, as I turned forty and into a
new age, a new decade of my own.
Reminding myself that time and space is a gift, not a punishment. It
is amazing that even as free-thinking as I like to believe I am, how
conditioned I still am into thinking that we are always meant to be
on - on - on - earning, doing, posting, scrolling, spending, especially
as a small business, as an entrepreneur. Remembering just how
important rest is as part of that cycle, I have used this as a massive
opportunity to watch and learn about my relationship with social
media, my work, my life and technology. I have seen just how
unhealthy my relationship to tech can be. As I write this I am still working
on finding my balance. It will probably always be a work in
progress. I want to use technology and social media in my life and
my business, but not have it be my life. I’m sure many of you feel
much the same. So let’s come together as we step into this new
era, this new age. Let’s give each other support and comfort as we
find our way towards a balance between our digital and physical
selves, as we learn and implement best practices for our digital
wellbeing.
I’m writing this for me, as much as for you.
A sort of accidental, second manifesto.
