#look the whole reason I started this blog is my psychosis making media so hard to watch / listen to

[artmotherhoodandmadness]

Is social media a substitute for religion and the mobile phone the new god?

Social media can suck you in, people are glued to their phones and stuck to the screen, so how do you fight back?

Nietzsche famously wrote that having followers is for losers, well not his words exactly, but he certainly was not impressed with people who sought followers, it encourages the herd/cult/sheep mentality and it generates unwanted attention and a potential backlash in the form of trolling – is the key then to use social media strategically and minimise the number of followers you have, but still put the content out there if you feel you have something of intrinsic value to say and share?

This photo was taken by Diego @TheLazyOnes, March 2017, just before I turned 44; so did I have to post this picture? Well I was manic and very tired when I did this shoot modelling their vintage dresses, I am dressed as Mia my alter ego, the one that I hide behind, so yeah in terms of my campaigning and how I deal with my mental health I think it is a powerful image when I know the reality of the situation and my mental state when it was taken which was very agitated. Also I believe in supporting independent shops like The Lazy Ones. It’s not just  a cool picture. I see depictions of women all the time that I find offensive, therefore surely I should put out alternative images depicting alternative representations of women and styles. This is how you can use social media to convey your views about a myriad of subjects and image/style/bodyimage/ageing is a huge topic. I can’t shy away from it. No way. And yeah the photo has an Instagram  filter on it, actually it didn’t need it.

We know that Twitter has been taken over by extremists, serial trollers, misogynists etc., we can’t retreat and let the bullies take over, surely there must be a way to navigate the turbulent sea of social media and avoiding a shark attack?

It wasn’t that long ago when I had no social media presence, no Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook and Whatsapp, too. It’s the end of 2014/2015 when it all changed and I decided to get on board the social media train. Now I have a YouTube channel too, I am such a sell out.

Facebook own Instagram and Whatsapp, they are all part of the same family, it feels very incestuous. I was quite happy with Dropbox but my husband told me to change to Google Drive, it was when I switched that strange things happened to my computer such as disappearing gigabytes. He is actually trying to encourage me to put all my data on there. I am ambivalent about doing so. He says it’s safe, I don’t think there is any such thing as safe. It’s like handing over my whole life to Google and giving them the key.

Forget it. 

For now I am sticking to unreliable hard drives, they are tangible, I can see them, if they break down at least I know the data is gone and Google doesn’t have it. I am planning to cancel my Google Drive account, it’s a waste of money and surely Google make enough money from us all. Apple take money from me monthly for iCloud storage for my phone, I have photos on there, which accumulate, the phone is designed so that you are more likely to hoard than delete, I am sure they could have made transferring data far simpler but they haven’t, hence the propensity to store and hoard and of course you need stuff on your phone to post to Instagram and Twitter, so the phone enslaves you. My goal is to have no photos on my phone one day, apart from work related. It is so clever how the photos are arranged too; it’s like an instant life album, which you can scan in seconds year by year. They have thought of everything.

What I find remarkable is that I managed to resist social media for so long, but if you avoid it then you slowly start to feel excluded. But the whole world is complicit, social media is the new global religion and the mobile phone a substitute god because we are glued to them, we worship them, we are dependent on them. It’s like a massive cult and the whole world is in on it, either blogging, or tweeting, or on YouTube seeking  stardom, it’s a big numbers game and some are more adept at social media than others. Perhaps it is far fetched to say the phone is the new god, but people seem very dependent on their phones, even deify them by making them more elaborate and ostentatious. I mean you can have a gold plated iPhone for starters - it’s getting ridiculous. 

I confess, I am crap at social media and proud of my social media ineptitude, I understand the rules of engagement, but can’t partake in them.

I have noticed that women who take off their clothes get more followers than those that don’t. Disturbing but predictable. No wonder teenagers find Instagram toxic for their mental health, the key is to post and not look at other accounts, this is what I do, for my own sanity. I do find YouTube very useful, if I need to learn something, have a problem, chances are someone has posted a little video about it - and I love learning, out of all the social media channels YouTube is the most useful and educational, in my opinion. But you can also watch beheading videos and child porn, too - that’s the flip side.

I don’t want to be a social medial slave, so I minimise my used that way I get to do other stuff with my life like play with my kids and make art. 

To ignore the social media machine requires huge willpower. I suppose I am stubborn, I do recall back in 2002 or 3 when my friend told me, ��Facebook is amazing’ and I just rolled my eyes and was not interested, and I recall others who were so adept at it and spoke of their 1000s of Facebook friends. I just wasn’t impressed, I was struggling with the imposition emailing and texting had on my life, I did not require more noise. I was convinced I would be the target of trolls and I have been.

Between 2001 and 2007 I was travelling extensively all over the world, I would have had lots of photos to post of Nepal, Bangladesh, New York, Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Cuba etc. without doubt, creatively I was exhibiting around the world and doing spoken word events, if there was any time I should have embraced social media it was during this very productive period. Between 2010 and 2013 I had my two children and could have started a Mummy blog, posted all the recipes I was coming up with, taken photos of my pregnancy and vlogged about my miraculous post baby weight loss, but I didn’t. All the photos I took during that time remain private. But I guess the real time would have been during my modelling days, people love modelling photos don’t they? Imagine if Twitter and Instagram had existed when I won Miss Bengali in 1994 in front of a packed audience at Theatre Royal in London. Thank God it didn’t. I don’t think I would have handled having followers that young. But there are kids who do have a 1000 Instagram followers for posting photos of their feet. That’s the world we live in.

Much of it seems nonsensical, meaningless, throwaway - except this is people’s lives we are dealing with.

What are we doing?

Where is this heading?

Why are we putting so much on the internet?

We are all broadcasters and our audience is the globe - that’s scary, but extraordinary at the same time.

There are times I have wanted to press the delete button on all my social media accounts.

But I can’t because I am a hoarder. Think of all those posts that no one is ever going to read or look at again? 

I would say I am a private person, but the pressure to reveal is growing and as someone with a mental health condition of course during periods of mania you can make yourself naked in the room. And it was because of mental health that I joined social media, I thought mental health was too important to stay silent. I had just written a book about it, Schizophrenics Can Be Good Mothers Too under the pseudonym Q S Lam in 2015, I genuinely thought my book could help others.

The turning point came when a woman from the US wrote to me and said she wished her friend had read my book because she killed herself and her baby due to postpartum psychosis. The Charlotte Bevan case impacted me profoundly and I was convinced Charlotte and her new-born would be alive today if they’d received the right care.

Very quickly I became engaged with an online mental health community and since then I have spoken about mental health at the House of Commons and House of Lords, and around the world, so was it worth it? If the posts help one person then yes, I think it is. A friend from Singapore saw my film posted on YouTube about psychosis and appreciated it. Another Malaysian mental health patient saw my film about suicidal ideation and it helped her when she, too, was feeling suicidal.

There is still huge ignorance and stigma related to mental health something that I have to deal with day-to-day, so I can’t stay silent, and the Royals have said it’s good to talk about mental health, and it is.

My approach is to help one person at a time, it’s snail like but thorough.

Another reason to engage with social media is, without doubt, because this will be the world that our kids inhabit, they are the tech generation. I am hoping though everyone will get bored, chuck their phones and computers out the window and revert to how life was pre the Internet. I doubt very much that will happen. However if I can learn to navigate this world then I will be better equipped to educate my children about the pitfalls etc.

The flip side of social media is it is hard to control and it has taken its toll on my mental health; now I try to control it rather than it controlling me.

When I first started with it all, very quickly friends accumulated on Facebook in fact it is the easiest platform to accumulate friends and followers. I still have 100s of friend’s requests but I don’t accept any that I do not know now. You wouldn’t give your number to strangers in the street so why would I allow strangers access to my life?  After some trolling and unwittingly being groomed by a sexual predator via Facebook and Twitter, I did a huge cull of people. I probably could reduce the number even further if I was really ruthless.

I also restrict my posts, sometimes I could do 10 posts a day - why? People can’t take it in so don’t bother. For example I have written at least 6 blogs in the last few days, but not yet posted them, I realise I don’t have to post everything as soon as I write it, I can do it in my own time. 

Most critically, iit’s a question of noise. How much noise and intrusion do you want in your life -  the more followers and friends you have the more noise right? You can make your posts public so anyone can see them on or off Facebook therefore the Facebook friends you choose to have need to be a tight circle of allies, supporters, family etc. I need to control what I put out there, not the other way round. There are professionals trained in this now, advising celebrities to carefully build up their brand image. Trump could do with more advice, but hopefully his erratic tweets will get him impeached.

I do resent the amount of information that Facebook and these other tech companies know about me, that my emails are being scanned by Google if linked to a gmail account, that I see tailored ads according to my interests - it is sinister, it feels like I am being watched, stalked and monitored.

Now that I have been sucked in, how do I take back control, what a turgid phrase, but control is very much the issue. Controlling the number of followers will reduce the amount of noise in my life.

More followers = more noise = more pressure = hot brain = mental health breakdown

However, I still want to share my articles, photos, music and art. On the rare occasion I post a photo of my children I switch the setting to just me after letting a few people see it, it is a guilty pleasure to see their faces on my feed. I am not proud of posting photos of them, and as a rule I don’t. Motherhood is lonely, when someone appreciates your child, it does give you a mental boost and makes you feel a sense of pride, but again it’s a slippery slope because you could spend all day posting cute photos of your kids and that’s not for me and it’s not fair on them either, they have a right to privacy. 

How do I use Social Media?

I post poems, artwork, photos from my archive, my art, photos of events, articles that I have written, many of which are about mental health and now films and music, too.

With Instagram I use the platform for my art mainly

With Facebook I post about mental health and share my art. poems, articles

With Tumblr my blogs relate to motherhood, politics and mental health, some of these articles are then republished via Huffington Post

With YouTube I post vlogs about mental health, films and most recently films about mental health, and now my music

Whatsapp helps me keep in contact with people globally for free, but I also only use it when necessary

With Twitter I post my work, reshare my articles, make comments about mental health and politics

I am eschewing Snapchat.

In terms of my followers the numbers could be deemed as pitiful, 143 Facebook friends, 563 Twitter followers, not sure how many Tumblr followers I have (I only follow a few blogs), my YouTube channel has a a handful of subscribers, and I have 177 followers on Instagram. In terms of stats they are appalling.

Diabolical.

Pitiful.

Risible.

But I really don’t want to go chasing likes and followers, it’s a trap. I prefer it this way, I could have easily acquired 1000 Facebook friends but I don’t want that at all. You can minimisie the number of followers and friends deliberately, you can do this by being selective in terms of who you follow or accept as friends. For example some Twitter and Instagram accounts are misleading, a person may have 20,000 followers but they are also following 20,000 people, so how many are actually genuine?  Similarly with celebrities they usually follow very few people but by virtue of being a celebrity, rather than the content they put out, they automatically get millions of followers. Others milk it assiduously like Kim Kardashian, but celebrities use social media as a marketing tool, to sell stuff primarily. And for ordinary people social media can be a source of revenue, it’s not for me and I don’t want it to be because then I really will become enslaved.

There is the other extreme, celebrities who have no social media presence, Kate Moss for example has a private Instagram account under a fake name with 12 followers, but then she’s an icon and she’s very private but she also doesn’t seem to have much to say either. There are others who are proud of their lack of social media presence like the actress Kate Blanchett, but then she can get the press to listen to her. For us mere mortals who want people to listen, who have something to say and share social media is the only way. And the fact is their kids will be into it even if they are not, so they better smarten up and learn about it fast.

I use social media to put out alternative content, my theory is that if I am strategic in terms of how I use it, what I put out there and control my posts then it could be a good resource for those with mental health problems. My posts are becoming more selective, deliberately so. Also as a Bangladeshi artist, I am putting my work out there too, it might inspire other Asians to go into the arts.

Personally just as sex education is taught in school, I think teaching kids how to use social media sensibly should be mandatory in all schools, because I didn’t have a clue when I started, I made so many mistakes, I learnt through trial and error, but with your kids they can  get bullied or groomed online etc, they need to wisen up and monitor their use and screen time. I am drilling it into my kids, my youngest is prohibited from using the iPad, my eldest has restricted use. Actually I hide it.  Of course there are kids who are already embroiled in social media with their YouTube channels and Instagram accounts. Maybe they make money from it? Get 1000s of followers, does that make it OK then?

I am not into posting 1000s of vacuous selfies or photos depicting what a fabulous life I have – that’s corrosive, but many people use it for this reason alone, I am not judging, but it leads to a competitive culture where people compare and start to envy or feel inadequate etc, not to dissimilar to when you see an airbrushed bill board of some half naked model in Calvin Klein jeans; I really don’t want to see that stuff, who does, but it’s thrust in our faces? I also don’t understand women who post endless photos in their bikinis, I mean one or two is ok, but 100s, 1000s, what is that all about? I posted one of me on my bike in a bikini on Brick Lane but I thought I was being an anarchist. I think there are two photos of me in a swimsuit on my Instagram feed and I am actually thinking of deleting them. A woman’s body is a thing of beauty but I would rather look at an Ingre painting than a woman in a stupid pose, arching her back with her tits out. My alter ego Mia is a bit of a poser but I have reigned her in. All these half naked selfies sets a precedent for other girls to do the same. Personally I want to be known for the contents of my brain and mind and what I create than the way I look or my body, but that’s just me.

The positives of social media is that I have met some interesting people and been involved in some cool projects and opportunities as a direct result, the negative side is the time it has and continues to consume. The likes game is a trap, each like results in a hit of dopamine and becomes addictive, you always want more, so it’s time to ditch that habit.

I still think social media is a necessary part of modern life now. Unfortunately it has been misappropriated and abused, but as long as there are people who use it sensibly and wisely it can be a force for good and social change. We can determine what we put out there and create alternative and informative content if we want to. The big concern is that the tech giants have become so enormous it is hard to escape their grip on our lives, however we can educate our children about social media and technology and perhaps they can be shrewder in their use of it.

Too much of anything is never good for you and too much social media is toxic for your health and life. Maybe we should have a no phone and no social media day and make it official?