This post first appeared on aud.life

I’ve closed my Facebook account. I’ve closed my LinkedIn account. I no longer cross-post to Google+ (Thanks, Google, for making that account intertwined with a Gmail account, required for usage of Google Hangouts, and as such un-deletable). I’ve never used Pinterest. I look at the privacy policies and TOS for apps like Meerkat or Voxer, and I’m certain I’ll never, ever sign up.

And several times as of late, my cursor has hovered over the “Deactivate Account” button on Twitter.

I haven’t pulled the trigger yet. I did unfollow about 1000 people last week. (I need to do a bunch of work with adding names to Twitter lists, and then I’ll probably unfollow a bunch more). I deleted the Twitter app from my Mac. I turned off almost all notifications on my phone.

I guess I could call it a "productivity hack" and leave it at that; I probably spend too much time on Twitter when I should be researching and writing. But honestly, much like my use of various blocking tools, it was mostly an(other) attempt to make Twitter tolerable.

Tolerable. Not “fun” or “engaging” or “friendly” or “useful.” Tolerable.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the difficulty of reconciling the demands to be “connected” – to be a “connected educator,” for example – with the need to be disconnected from social media platforms that grow increasingly unpleasant. The surveillance. The data extraction. The harassment. The (free) emotional and intellectual labor that one is compelled to perform there.

Disconnecting might be necessary for emotional and physical well-being.

I don’t mean this as an argument for what Nathan Jurgenson has called “The IRL Fetish,” that somehow we must unplug from technologies in order to fully experience “real life.” (He discusses this alongside the tendency to separate online and offline - “digital dualism.”) Quite the opposite: I recognize the real, material toll that the “work” online, particularly in social media, takes upon us.

This "work" has broad implications for education - for teachers and students alike - and I think require far more interrogation of how "privileges" work in (education) technology's infrastructure.

[Preliminary thoughts here... quite clearly not fully fleshed out as an article. One more thing I plan to use Known for.]