Earlier this year, in my great social media purge of 2020, I deleted my goodreads, facebook, twitter and instagram. I’ve since re-created the twitter and instagram because I deemed them to be necessary evils, but then enjoyed re-creating my online experience too much and decided to lock them. For now, with my writing career ground to a halt and dormant, it feels like locking one (IG) and deactivating the other (twitter) is the best thing to do. I’ve too many deadlines of the academic sort, and other things occupying my time to want to bother with the other (frequently toxic and soul-destroying) stuff.
As for goodreads, I found the untethering from social media-related reading and the constant sense of surveillance really releasing. And yesterday, I decided that 8 years of having all my music data logged at last.fm was more than enough. One never realises the amount of weight these things carry at the edge of one’s consciousness. I haven’t really been checking last.fm in ages and my increasingly eclectic and erratic listening choices lately messes up algorithms on spotify and last.fm. But it’s still a weight that lingers on one’s mind. Of how much of your listening and reading autonomy you’re just signing away when you’re not thinking about it. How much data about you is out there.
I’m trying my best to be more mindful about that these days.
So, last.fm’s deleted, and I’m enjoying the untethering of both my listening and reading journey. Blog posts on both the (locked) music and media blog, and the book blog will likely resume in 2021. But for now, I am working till the end of the year on my desperate academic deadlines including examining a PhD dissertation. No rest for academics. Not even the underachievers amongst us (lifts hand).