Notes from my "unengaged user" phase

What I observed during two months of unintentional social media passivity

Hi there! It’s me again — finally. For the past two months I’ve needed to focus the vast majority of my time and energy on parenting. As I’ve shared in the past, I struggle to manage the unique needs of both of my children while also running my consulting business. I’m incredibly thankful my work situation allows me a lot of flexibility — not every parent is so fortunate — but this newsletter and my passion for helping people embrace the positive aspects of social media had to be put on the back burner for a bit.

As a social media aficionado, it has felt weird to be less “engaged” than I’ve ever been since my very first Facebook post in April of 2009 announcing my exhaustion because my then-7-month-old baby kept waking up every two hours every night. (Proof that fatigue has been a near-constant condition of parenting for me.)

Even though I advise people and organizations to only use social media in ways that align with their capacity and enthusiasm (not out of obligation), I’ve had moments of worry that I’m not producing enough (thank you “hustle culture”), and that not being visible on the socials will hurt my business. I was surprised to hear this same worry articulated by the lead singer of AJR at recent concert in Colorado Springs — (my now 14-year-old’s first concert ever!) — telling the record-setting crowd he had been afraid the fans might have forgotten him since he hadn’t been very active on social media and the band hadn’t toured for a while.

There’s a lot of pressure in our digital world to be present on social media in order to remain relevant. My “unengaged user” phase helped me reject that pressure. After more than a decade of almost daily communication and sense-making in digital spaces, this extended period of living life without sharing online reaffirmed for me that occasionally disconnecting from social media helps us maintain a healthy approach to our online activity.

I also had moments of worrying that the relationships I’ve built with my networks and followers would atrophy from neglect. One of the key ways of making digital spaces more welcoming and inclusive is positive engagement: letting people know they matter and showing appreciation when they share their experiences, hearts, and talents. I’ve felt guilty for not amplifying the important work of others as much as I normally do and for not commenting on milestones, achievements, and losses over the past several weeks. But I truly didn’t have it in me.

For as long as I’ve been writing and talking about the upsides of social media people have approached me to say they can see the value in positive social media activity, they simply don’t have the bandwidth to do it. I’ve always validated that perspective. No one needs one more chore on an already overwhelming to-do list.

Until life forced me into this “unengaged user” experience, though, I didn’t really get it. I’ve never viewed my personal social media use as a chore. I’ve been an enthusiastic user ever since I saw its power to build and rally community during the Waldo Canyon Fire in 2012. I’m thankful my unplanned digital “inactivity” helped me better understand the perspective of infrequent and reluctant social media users. If you’re one of them, please know it’s never my intention to make you feel obligated to interact in digital spaces. Positive social media should be enjoyable, not a burden.

Equating social media with actions like writing posts, making comments, and engaging can make it seem obligatory. “Online you’re expected to interact, not hide, eavesdrop, and slink away,” futurist Virginia Heffernan writes in her thought-provoking book Magic and Loss: The Internet as Art. (You can subscribe to her Substack by the same name here.) That’s what most people mean when they say they don’t have the bandwidth to “do” social media: they don’t have time to do the activities that have come to define it.

There’s so much more to social media, though, than the things engagement metrics track. Heffernan pushes back against a reductive view of digital media, asking, “But what name did it used to go by, this practice of anonymously sitting back and taking in long sequences of words without producing any yourself? Hey, wasn’t it once called ‘reading’?”

Unless people fall into a relatively small category of those who have zero social media accounts, most people are “reading” social media: skimming feeds, absorbing headlines, gleaning bits of information about other people, being exposed to some topics and ideas for the very first time, and learning a little about all of them … whether they want to or not. An “unengaged user” — a social media reader, if you will — may actually consume more content than an “engaged user.”

During my “unengaged” phase, I consumed far more content than I do when I’m posting and interacting. Why? Scrolling and reading and thinking about content requires less interpersonal energy than creating and commenting. I was able to feel connected to people and ideas when I didn’t have the capacity to engage in a visible way.

This type of passive connection is far more common than active engagement. For years, various studies have shown that only 10%-30% of social media users contribute 90+% of content and measured engagement. My own research aligns with these numbers.

It makes sense. Before the advent of online comments, there was no expectation that a large number of readers would express an opinion about a newspaper or magazine article in a public forum. The merit of an article wasn’t judged by how many people “liked” it or “shared” it. Once upon a time, people consumed entire publications that significantly shaped their view of the world without ever telling the writers or publishers about the effect their words had. My Substack stats tell me that many of my most dedicated readers — those of you who open every newsletter (thank you!!!!) — have never left a comment or reached out to me via social media. I welcome interaction, but I don’t expect it.

Think about how common the identifier “longtime listener, first time caller” was (is?) on radio shows. These days it’s fairly common in digital forums and groups to see something like, “Longtime lurker, first time commenting.”

Lots of people pay attention for long periods of time without ever making their attention known.

The standard engagement metrics can’t track the moment a person’s attention is so captured by something they encounter on social media that they begin to think deeply about it, seek out additional information, or change their mind or behavior. The light bulb reaction on LinkedIn sort of gets at that sentiment, but there’s really no way to tell if a clicked reaction means anything more than that content was seen.

Even if there was a quick “made me think” reaction, we might not think to click for the posts that deeply penetrate our consciousness. There are posts we brush past in annoyance that come back to us at a later date and prompt us to keep thinking. There are posts we barely skim because we think they aren’t relevant to us, but when our circumstances change or we experience something new, we realize a kernel from the post stuck with us. There are posts that spark an internal stock-taking or inner dialogue that eventually spills out into our conversations and changes our perspective. We’d never be able to react or comment on post at the time we see it, because it’s only begun its work in us. And, there are the posts that move and change us deeply, but that we feel self-conscious, wrong, or out-of-place reacting to or commenting on. Nothing we say sounds sufficient to explain our gratitude or admiration or to make it clear we’re not making someone else’s life experiences about us.

If you’ve ever felt like no one cares about your posts because they’re not performing well according to engagement metrics, consider this:

My “unengaged user” phase underscored how the things I care about most deeply — the things that are nuanced, complex, or hard — are the things I’m least likely to engage with or comment on. It’s not easy to articulate complicated thoughts in a way that seems appropriate to a personal-yet-public forum, and a simple reaction seems insufficient to communicate how deeply a post impacted me.

When I have bandwidth, I push through the difficulty because the algorithms reward posts that garner engagement, and I want more people to encounter the posts that move me. Most people, however, aren’t thinking about the algorithm when they encounter a meaningful-to-them post.

When we judge the “success” of our social media posts by engagement metrics that fail to capture much of the real impact of social media — or when we design our content to fit them — we deprive our networks (and the broader world) of our beautiful, quirky humanness. We miss the opportunity to connect with the people who are searching for the kind of content that doesn’t lend itself to easy engagement and to create unique impact by sharing our non-performative selves, experiences, and passions.

“Unengaged” users are consuming social media content, thinking about it, and changing their minds and behaviors because of it. But they can only consume the content that’s out there. We all play a role in deciding what that is, so share the world you want to see!