Sustaining Focus
Reimagining Our Relationship to Social Media
PHOTO BY JESS DRAWHORN
As we shared in Welcome Home, Loam will be focusing our attention in 2024 on (1) print projects; (2) online and in-person workshops; (3) our mobile library; and (4) this missive. For us, a big part of sharpening our focus right now means reimagining our relationship to social media.
Social media can be a bridge for budding organizers searching for a movement home and a haven for folks who live far from people who look or think or love like them. It can be a valuable channel for sharing vital information and a powerful tool for storytelling.
But social media is not a neutral space. As a platform designed to divert focus and flatten nuance, it has the power to extract as much as expand.
For us, engaging less and less with social media means engaging more and more with in-person actions, online newsletters, and community bulletin boards. Ours is a small team, and we don’t always have the bandwidth to sufficiently tend to social media and to our collaborative projects.
It’s important to note that as culture workers, we don’t want what we do to distract, or to diminish, from issues that necessitate urgent action.
This is particularly true right now. In the face of the U.S.-backed genocide in Gaza, we must continue to amplify Palestinian voices, and agitate for an immediate end to Israel’s brutal occupation of Palestine. This requires us to do everything we can—from flooding social media to marching in the streets—to catalyze change.
As our planetary systems destabilize, violent regimes across the world are tightening their grip. Meeting this moment requires immense focus from our movements. Every one of us needs to get clear on what platforms and projects inspire action rather than apathy.
This is a deeply personal consideration. For many immunocompromised activists, for example, social media can be a powerful—and accessible—tool, particularly as we navigate an (ongoing) pandemic. And in our own lives, Loam hasn’t logged off just yet from social media: we continue to find some value in it.
So it’s our hope that this essay can be a gesture—however small—toward critically reflecting on what spaces sustain (or drain) our attention. Because we can’t lose focus, not now.
FREE PALESTINE
During our sabbatical this past year, Kailea and I really sat with what shape we wanted Loam to take if and when we emerged.
Print publishing has—and will always be— at the core of our praxis. Over the course of the past 9 years, Loam has designed infographics on herbal allies for wildfire season to post in public libraries and shared our publications on disaster preparedness for free with communities. We love that print is a medium that can readily reach people wherever they are.
Sustaining our print praxis requires some negotiation: print has an overhead that digital doesn’t (it’s part of why we’re continuing to invest in this online newsletter). But our vision for 2024 is to focus more and more on the material.
To do so requires a clear articulation of our roles and responsibilities as creators. Notes Shira Erlichman:
“With time-bound arts (movies, novels, poems, songs) you are essentially in charge of shepherding another person’s attention. [...] What a beautiful responsibility it is to create a work of art. What an amazing power. How do I guide another person’s attention?”
That you are here, right now, reading this essay, is an immense gift. And to honor the gift of your attention, we need to honor the limitations of our own. We’re a small team, and Loam is a labor of love. How do we honor multiple stories without losing the narrative? How do we focus on what is our work in the world without siloing ourselves? How do we tend to our mental health without tuning out?
When we consider these questions, we’re motivated by a hunger to move toward more life in our processes and projects. This means (1) diversifying our strategies for connection and communication; and (2) tending to spaces that help us come home to our humanity.
Diversifying our strategies for connection and communication is a pretty straightforward inquiry. It’s not just that every option we have to connect—social media, Substack, print—is intrinsically imperfect and insufficient. It’s that every option we have to connect is at risk. In the same way that biodiversity within ecosystems nourishes resilience, diversity within communications fosters adaptability.
In the face of racist algorithms, shadowbanning, and censorship1, we have to cultivate options in how we connect to each other so that when the server goes down, or some billionaire scrambles everything up, we have back-up plans. Spending less time on social media is a spiritual pursuit in sustaining our attention, sure, but it’s also a practical consideration. We don’t want to feel as if any one space is our only lifeline. So we are focusing on a select few in the hopes that we can continue to stay connected.
Tending spaces that help us come home to our humanity, however—to our collective sense of interdependence, grief, love, and care — is a trickier task. In the face of compounding permacrisis, it can be hard to figure out just where to focus our attention, and difficult to discern what is a distraction—and what is a source of sustenance.
As k’eguro shares in their essay on distraction:
“Distraction can be an invitation to renew engagement. It might be the break we need. Or the break we want. Not a pulling away but a pulling toward. Not a pulling out, but a pulling with.”
But there’s a distinction between the “distractions” k’eguro invokes—a neighbor stopping by to say hey, a friend “disrupting” your day in distress—and the distractions that silo us further in our selves. And more and more, social media pulls us out rather than pulls us with.
This is true for our community, too. Over the course of the past few years, many of us are spending less time in our enfleshed selves and more time on our screens. Writes David Abram in “Magic and the Machine”:
“…the sensorial world of our carnal experience is increasingly filled with horrific wounds, wounds that we feel in our flesh whenever we dare to taste the world with our creaturely senses. It’s too damned painful. Hence there’s ever more reason to retreat from the body’s world, to avoid the sensuous terrain with its droughts and its floods and its flaring wildfires, taking refuge in ever more mediated and virtual spaces.”
For those of us who have the privilege of choice, retreating deeper and deeper into online spaces such as social media can “save us” from the enfleshed ache of living through collapse—and of encountering our own complicity in it. The virtual world is not immune from the same pain that stalks through the sensorial world, but you don’t have to feel the “hot” loss that might course through you if you were fully in your human body.
And this scares us at Loam because if we are to sustain our capacity to show up in this era of escalating ecological emergency, we need to feel—really feel—our humanity.
Coming home to our humanity can help us attune to our interdependence. It can also throw our vulnerability into relief.
Sometimes, when I consider my mortality, it doesn’t scare me so much as sharpen my focus. I am reminded that our time here, together, is precious, and precarious, and that I want to steward it well.
I don’t live like that as often as I would like: I’m easily tired, and distracted. Fear of death can make me careless with how I spend my time, as if by treating the days lightly I might somehow counterspell their fleetingness.
But when I do live like that—in love, and in relationship— it’s easier to make grounded decisions about how to steward my time. We only get this one iteration, and I want to spend it more in the sensorial world than on the screen.
To sink into the sensorial world, however, we need to truly presence with every emotion (love, possibility, despair, rage) that lives in our enfleshed selves. And in the wake of catastrophic ecological and sociopolitical strife, I think it’s particularly important to practice presencing with grief.
Ours is a death-phobic and grief-phobic society. In many ways, the structure of social media sustains this myth. Social media changes the channel on you: it’s an infinite scroll that might shepherd you from footage of an active genocide to an advertisement for fast fashion over the course of a minute or two. You never really get to meaningfully grieve what you have seen.
I don’t think the answer is to look away. To do so would be a rejection of our responsibilities. I think the work is to figure out what is needed to truly grieve.
When I reflect on how Loam is reconsidering our relationship to social media right now, so much of it is rooted in a hunger to protect our grief. Over the course of the past few months, we’ve turned to social media to access necessary resources and amplify vital information. But when we need to grieve, we sign off. When we need to be with the pain, we don’t want the channel to change on us.
There are many reasons we might struggle to really feel our grief. We might not have the resources to cope, or the language to articulate our pain. We might not be in a community that’s safe for us, or in a family that makes space for mourning. Grief is complicated.
But learning how to grieve—individually and collectively—is necessary in this era of ecological emergency. As Colette Pichon Battle shares in an interview for On Being:
“To really, really admit that you understand what is happening to the planet, it will break your heart. If you don’t cry deep, hard tears for the state of this planet and all of the people on it, you don’t yet understand the problem. [And] once you get to that place, the only thing that can bring you out of that kind of darkness is belief in something greater than yourself.”
As Battle reminds us, grief work can guide us toward meaningful action. This isn’t easy work, and how to do it isn’t something that I have a good answer to. I just know that in my own life, fear of grief has driven me to distraction. And even though distraction can have value—the “freeze” response has its own intelligence2—living long-term in the “pause” is not a sustainable solution. We owe more to ourselves, and each other.
When we continually disrupt the flow of grief—and spending too much time on social media can do that—our grief doesn’t just dissipate. It stays in us, gunks stuff up. Flowing with grief isn’t so much about eradicating the ache (there are some losses that will always live in us) as it is about witnessing the raw materiality of our pain. Grief has its own animacy: surrendering to it might ask you to stay still, or show up, or reach out. But you won’t ever really know what your own grief needs from you if you don’t–or can’t— create the conditions to presence with it.
It’s within this context that the privilege of ‘guiding another person’s attention’ has particular resonance. Your attention is a gift, and one of our responsibilities as culture workers is to create the conditions for every one of us to more fully feel. In the face of death-making systems, our sentience is radical.
Creating spaces that foster sentience is a relational practice. And moving at the pace of relationship (adrienne maree brown) means attuning ourselves to the particular.
In 2020, Kailea facilitated a workshop on accountability for our Sumbios Creative Support cohort that I continue to reference. Accountability, she argued, wasn’t about following orders—do this, not that— but building relationship.
As Kailea illuminated, the future is relational. This means that we have to center real (messy, complicated, tender) relationship in our communications. That’s tough to square with the structure of social media, mostly because accountability is not necessarily a discrete, or singular action. Relationships are shifting terrain, and what it means to be accountable requires continual attunement and attention.
But it’s that terrain—fluid, variable, relational—that Loam wants to live in and create from. Although it can be uncomfortable, apprenticing ourselves to the specific, to the felt, makes room for manifold possibilities to emerge.
So we are showing up. And the only way we know how to sustain showing up is to continually get clear on what we need to do to honor and to hone our attention.
Our world is changing fast, and finding channels to continue to communicate and connect is critical. When we reflect on what is needed for us to sustain our focus, pulling back from social media as part of “pulling with” is key to that process. But it's meaningless to argue only in absolutes: any commitments we make are subject to the surrounding elements. Maybe we’ll refocus our efforts on IG in the future. Maybe we’ll shut it down. Right now, we are continuing to post actions and amplify resources, but it’s not the primary source of our attention, or our action.
Sometimes, when I am working on a project—writing maybe, or developing a curriculum—I can lose my feel for what matters. Ideas that made sense in my head dissolve upon contact with the page. Structures start to blur. In those moments, I always reach out to friends for guidance. Their perspective helps me find the thread again.
When considering what spaces can support us in practicing discernment, cultivating critical analysis, and deepening connection, maybe the question isn’t multiple-choice (social media: yes or no?) Maybe the question is open-ended. What people, projects, platforms, and places call you home?
When you are lost, unfocused, and unsure: who (or what) helps you find the thread again? Build community? Process your grief? Sustain your attention?
It might be that social media is part of that process. It might not. It might be that the answer changes (that’s very true for us right now). The work is to find who and what continually calls you home.
Our hope at Loam is that we can be a call home for one another.
Here with you.
Kate
Slow Factory’s Open Edu Critical Media Studies curriculum is a solid resource for diving deeper into some of these issues.
Embodiment counselor tayla shanaye speaks beautifully to this in our 2022 publication “Locate Your Liberate.”