Unlearning Social Media

When I came back to blogging after years of being in and out of it, I did so mostly because I wanted to leave social media behind. Sure, some people never stopped. There are people who have been blogging for twenty-plus years while the rest of us were tweeting away. I admire (and envy) them. I wish I were one of them. Because I wasn't, I ended up carrying a lot of social media assumptions into blogging. It's only recently that I've started noticing them. Having a blog isn't a replacement for social media Sometimes I have this feeling that I need my blog posts to be seen, and I need it now. And I use the verb "seen" here intentionally, because that feeling is not about wanting to be read. I need to be seen. Not read. Seen. It's the dopamine hit of the like and the retweet. It has very little to do with being understood. Blogs are social, but they aren't social media. People interact with us through our writing, conversations happen, communities form. But it all moves at a slower pace,…