My social media usage is probably different from yours. If for you social media is an escape from work, for me it is the opposite – spending time on social media is a part of my work as a musician. Taking a break, for me, means putting my phone on do-not-disturb, reading a book, riding a bike, practicing – anything but posting, or thinking about posting.

When I bought my first “smartphone”, I made a promise to myself that I wouldn’t use it in the subway. In those days, my subway time was spent sketching music – I’d get on a train, find a seat, pull out my sketchbook and scribble away. I wrote so much music in transit twenty years ago – now I know why.  That was then – these days, if I can find a seat, I’m mostly listening to language courses, reading, answering emails / texts, and, on a rare occasion, listening to music. (Some part of this is due to the pocketable nature of the phone, and the lamentable disappearance of the pocket Moleskine music sketchbooks, which have been out of print for a decade.)

Every so often I try to write a post about my relationship with social media, hoping to catalogue for myself how it’s changing, and what remains the same. (In 2019, I wrote a cello concerto about it, “Cellostatus”, that was recently released on an album by Nicholas Finch and the NouLou Chamber Players.)

As before, I mostly use social media to post about my work, read direct messages, and check my notifications. I still enjoy seeing what my friends are up to –– all of my friends are so accomplished, always going somewhere, doing things -– but to see their posts I have to endure a feed that’s 40-60% filled with ads, recommended posts, re-posts of memes and AI slop. I have no desire to scroll — scrolling through my FB/IG feeds longer than a few seconds, a handful of posts, makes me fidgety and sad. I read my messages, check notifications, and head out – that’s my ideal behavior.

I would like not to consider myself an addict – I average about 3 hours a week across social media (FB+IG), or about 25 minutes a day – including days when I post content and respond to comments. This is not a lot – and yet, even these 25 minutes feel like an injection of content, a strobe light of scandal between my eyes.

Add to this the deluge of AI-generated posts.   A few months ago, my FB feed opened with several friends re-sharing a story about a Holocaust survivor named “Henek” holding a violin as he was walking out of the camp – the Auschwitz Museum condemned the post as an AI generated fake. This is only going to get worse.  These days on FB, AI-generated reels are near very top of the news feed and there is no way to get rid of them.

As a content maker, I am realizing from in-person conversations that a growing number of my friends have broadly stopped using social media — they have stopped posting, deleted the apps, grayscaled their phones, or added screen time restrictions to keep themselves in check. Part of my work this year was reconstituting updates on this website — especially for folks who have quit, for those whose social media minutes are limited.

Though I have tried other platforms — and I was very optimistic about the fediverse projects such as BlueSky and Mastodon — FB remains my favorite platform as a content maker for one simple reason — it is flexible. It allows me to post long-reads if I want, a mix of videos and still photos with individual captions; it allows me to post links – and even though each of these things might net less interaction than a simple selfie, it’s still good to be able to post in a format that suits the post best. I’ve had 5,000 friends on Facebook (still the maximum) for well over a decade – wouldn’t it be nice if half of them saw my posts? In practice, maybe 10% of my readership engages with even my most popular posts.

I know that engagement metrics are a factor of a) everyone being overwhelmed, b) everyone’s feed is at least 50% advertisements or suggested posts and finally, c) my work isn’t headline news. Playing a show or a tour or releasing a new album isn’t — and shouldn’t be — on the same level as the multitudes of disasters around the world. I know all this and don’t take it personally.

And so, I persist on posting music and concert announcements, occasional videos from concerts, and try to keep other stuff minimal.   It’s worth mentioning, perhaps, that I find no correlation between social media activity and real-world attendance at concerts. The best way to invite people to a concert remains through individual outreach.

As a musician operating in content gardens, I am but a content provider (or a discontent provider), and my viewership in these gardens is commensurate with how engaging and useful my content is for the mix of dopamine-inducing swirl on the platform.

When I joined BlueSky and Mastodon I was hoping that there might be a growing community out there lurking and interested in live music or new recordings, i.e. content that I’m specialized in providing. And while it’s possible that it may be there and growing, we haven’t found each other yet; so far only a handful of my FB/IG friends have made the jump to the newer platforms. (I’ve paused posting on BlueSky and Mastodon for now.)

So that’s where I am this year.

For my friends who post on social media, they should know by now that I won’t read their post unless I’m tagged in it somehow, and/or unless it’s shared with me – even then, it might take some time for me to read it.

Thanks for reading!  Now back to work – see you out there!

—Ljova