How Can We Be More Mindful Of Social Media & Music Consumption?

This has been a bit of a brain worm for a while now, and it's been inspired a bit more due to the fact I've finally cleared out my email for the first time in what feels like forever. 

Everything is so cluttered now- my social media feed, the people I follow, the people that follow me. I don't even bother going and looking back at some of my older email accounts from previous blogs. The amount of email lists for random record labels and PR companies that it has been opted into drive in nearly 50 press releases bombing into the inbox a day. Jazz, pop, rap, obscure labels and PR companies for the furthest corners of extreme metal genres in languages I cannot understand. (Which, let's be for real, anything outside of English I cannot comprehend)

Even the general Pozer Club feed has become cluttered with the mass amount of bands pushing themselves online, trying to discover new audiences, and this isn't a complaint of that. This is coming from a place of being sick of simply liking, scrolling, and never further engaging with something outside of the 45 second window optimized with a hook, call to action, and enough movement in the background to keep me from scrolling away. 

I've taken a bit of a jump, clearing out my social media account and trying to remove anyone I follow that I simply don't know- don't care for anymore, or never remember following. Striving for something, maybe in misplaced optimism, that I'd like to move back to the original goal of my social media feed. Seeing what I care about, and content that I'd actually engage in.

Now this works on both sides- I cannot simply refine this list of things I engage with, just to continue mindlessly scrolling and not engaging on it.

I went through my personal IG, and began removing followers that my account had amassed since creating it in middle school. Hundreds of dead, abandoned, or bot accounts mixed into a roster of people I at one point had some kind of connection to. It was almost like an archeological dig to what these platforms used to be. I can't tell you how many fan accounts there were on my following lists- everything from Billie stans, to Ariana stans, and the old stan accounts or street teams of bands like Nothing More.

But this really read to me that this signaled an era when more people engaged as a community on topics they cared about- fandoms populating in the form of networks of stan accounts engaging with each other that inevitably spiraled into something like a snake eating it's own tail. People became performative, and with that pushed the very thing that bore these accounts to come to life also atrophied and led to their extinction.... Community. 

The need to have more followers, a better like to comment ratio, saves, sends, copy link and share- the pipeline of enjoying something and building a community around it. Only to fall victim to the ratrace of optimization and performance metrics comparative to another creators in your space.

It became less about engaging with other fans (being a villager in the village), to using your performance metrics as some kind of leverage of being 'better than' others in the space. And, when people stop having fun in a fandom space because they aren't taken seriously because they don't conform to this freshly skewed concept that everyone needs to be a influencer, you need to have a certain number of followers to be taken seriously in a space, and to get you must give- leading to hollow engagements in the hopes for a 'comment for comment'. 

All of this ramble leading on to say-

I want to be more mindful of the communities I participate in, the almost 'single use' way in which we've adopted engaging with our interested, and this constant garbage disposal flow of people pushing themselves out there to get thousands of first time engagement only to never see the band again. 

So, I'm deleting the bulk. I'm trying to start from a cleaner slate, and I'm really asking myself what I want to get out of the time I spend online. We only have so much time- I am sick of scrolling and scrolling only to feel nothing then and afterwards. I miss the fulfillment of meaningful community- event if it comes at the expense of higher engagement counts and follower/following ratios. 

The internet used to be slow. Slower, at least. Maybe this is my selling my house in the city and moving to a ranch to make bread in a way too expensive oven. But I refuse to let up on what I know used to be there. I want to carve out a place, even if small, that I can consume, digest, and contemplate the media I put onto my own plate. 

And I feel like others deserve to be able to do that as well.