One of the universal experiences of parenting is that you severely underestimate how much time your children will demand your attention. There is no way to prepare for the amount of times you’ll be interrupted mid-conversation, asked expressly to “look at me” or “watch this”. Youth comes with a healthy dose of narcissism.
As we grow older, we learn to become self-conscious about being observed. I don’t work directly with younger kids, but having kids myself has reminded me of how well we learn to hide our feelings and thoughts as we grow older.
The advent of interconnected platforms for “sharing ideas” that we’ve somehow named “social media” has put a value on this particular brand of narcissism. It has incentivized in an unprecedented way the value of clinging onto a sort of childish “look at me” attitude. One reason I believe for younger people being generally better at utilizing social media is undoubtedly their comfort with the new technologies they are designed for, another is the developmentally appropriate self-involvement.
At this point you may be asking, is this going to be the umpteenth rant on the evil of social media that I will, without any sense of irony, find by clicking through on a social media site. I can say definitively that it will not be. I don’t find judge social media apps to be evil any more than I think candy, drugs or pornography are evil. I don’t judge any of those things, they are what they are the impact they have on people can widely vary.
But if we accept social media for what it is, it’s important to think about how all of us want to engage with it, and I thought it would be valuable to share with all of you how I try to “engage” on social media and where that leads me to swim upstream. And most importantly, why I think that’s worth it.
“Look at me” but only like
Earlier this week, swimming “influencer” Kyle Sockwell posted a rant across his social media channels. You can read it in full, but I’ll quickly summarize what I think is relevant to the conversation I’m trying to have here.
Sockwell is upset by people who he “reads or hears about…talking shit about the work that I do”. Maybe he’s going to be upset reading this, that’s to be determined. His post highlights one of the constant complaints cited by people as they grow more popular in online spaces. The attention that he has gotten has scaled disproportionately with negativity and hate.
The more popular you get, the exponentially more hate you get, and as I’ve pointed out in many other forums, negativity is not power-scaled equally with positivity. I have not noticed any growing negativity towards Sockwell, but I’m not paying close attention and I’m not sure it matters. A little bit of hate goes a long way, with any human being.
Being a social media star does seem to be a bit of “live by the sword, die by the sword”. In a bygone era, I was an occasional partner and up close spectator at the internet 2.0 attempt to do what Sockwell is doing. Garrett McCaffrey when he ran Floswimming had similar stated goals to Sockwell. He wanted to build the popularity of the sport and draw more attention to competitions that were poorly covered.
Where there paths diverged is obvious to me. Recently Sockwell was at the Army-Navy dual meet. I clicked through a carousel of photos from the competition. There were 17, most of which featured Sockwell in some way. In internet 3.0, the number one way to get “ahead” in the social media game is to promote yourself, to put yourself out there.
In almost all of Sockwell’s coverage, we hardly ever here from athletes or coaches. You know, the people that actually make the sport happen. Whereas Garrett, and of course I am biased here (but also right), would travel to visit a program and produce long form content with coaches and athletes. Sure, a lot of people knew who Garrett was in those days, but he was not front and center. The athletes and the coaches were.
Ultimately, Sockwell has proven much more popular than anything that came before him. To me though it begs the question, are we actually building up the brand of swimming or are we building up the brand of Sockwell?
I know the above is going to come off as a criticism, so let me add this. I think Sockwell is playing the game as it is designed. He is playing it beautifully. And I find him to be a genuinely kind soul. That compounds my worry- because as he builds his profile the way he is, he will only encounter more negativity. I’m not endorsing it, but building a profile around yourself comes with increased attention good and bad to just that: yourself.
Put yourself out there, they say
This can all sound like sour grapes from someone who just hasn’t broken through in the same way. I’ll take that critique all day, any day. You’re welcome to make it. If you don’t trust that what I’m about to say is honest that’s up to you.
I’ve gotten a lot of good advice about how to get more “engagement” with my content and build up my own personal brand, and I’ve stubbornly resisted taking it. I have had to wrestle with that as an independent business person. The predominate wisdom of the day is that these platforms are “free” marketing tools.
Utilizing them to promote something, I’ve been told, should not compromise your values in any way. Let me give you a few examples I’ve heard:
“It’s ok to use clickbait titles if the content is good”
“Be provocative to get people into the comments, it will bring more attention to the message you are actually trying to get across”
“Fire hose content up so that you can show your ‘consistency’ and bend the algorithm to your favor”
But for each, I can’t see that any of it is more or less a strategy to draw attention to me. Using clickbait titles does not improve my content. I’ve often found that the most thoughtful content online does not draw comments whatsoever. People read it/see it and because they actually think, they don’t instantly diarrhea their thoughts onto whatever app they encountered it on.
The fire hose is it’s own mess. Once you train your brain to be “consistent” content wise, you don’t magically learn to produce in equal proportion more valuable thoughts. So really what people are doing when they are being consistent online is stripping the value out of what they do and actually training themselves to say as little as possible so that they have something to put up on a daily basis.
The goal becomes, more or less, entertainment. When it comes to swimming, I think that if we spend our time chasing entertainment, we subtract all the things that I love about the sport. There is nothing inherently entertaining about staring at a sterile line in a humid cave. There is, however, something incredible about the people that choose to spend their time on it. There is so much you can learn by committing yourself to the more mundane aspects.
What I value about not chasing my own cult of personality is that on any pool deck there is one coach who has read something I wrote or listened to a podcast who will never in a million years give it attention on social media. They will walk up to me fully thinking “I bet he would like to hear from me. And I genuinely do.