Amelia Knott wants to get off social media. But then again, she doesn't.
"Many of us experience this tension between needing or relying on the tools that we find through social media," she says, "but then also being really aware of the ways it colonizes our attention, divides us, has a lot of negative impacts on our mental health."
Knott is a registered psychotherapist and registered art therapist based in Slocan who works with clients online. She's just released a book entitled The Art of Thriving Online: a Workbook, published by Sounds True.
She says many people feel they need social media for a variety of reasons — their business, their hobbies, their activism — and they use it to keep in touch with family and far-away friends.
Social media platforms are also useful for keeping up with community events, including emergencies. When Knott and her husband were evacuated from Slocan this past summer because of wildfires, "I couldn't get off the Slocan Valley Community Web because it was a real-time source of of news and information. It was the way that people were coming together when we were all spread out ... dislocated from our homes. But at the same time, a Facebook group amplifies the most negative or loudest voices."
Social media can be genuinely helpful, but it is also designed to be addictive. That's the paradox Knott addresses in her book.
Knott doesn't lay out a plan for a digital detox because "willpower and discipline alone doesn't really help us understand the deeper things that are happening for us online."
Instead, Knott's book leads the reader through an exploration of how social media affects our productivity, our feelings of worthiness, our privacy, our fear, our anger, our home, our body, and our sense of belonging.
Most of Knott's clients did not originally intend to consult her about their problems with social media, she says, but social media enters the conversation because it amplifies the clinical issues clients bring to her.
Knott's book is, in its structure, a workbook written by an art therapist. There are lots of blank spaces on the pages for writing and drawing.
Each thematic chapter includes a mix of information, research, reflection questions, "hacks that help," playlist creation, and invitations to "scribble, cut, rearrange, draw, doodle, fill in the blanks, and much more."
The book includes a chapter about how social media insists users compare themselves to others. Knott asks the reader to write a case study of a successful person, someone they are envious. The study will speculate on what that person on social media is not showing us and what they struggle with.
That sets the reader up to look at how they might be compressing or flattening the image of themselves on social media, and how this affects their wellbeing.
Every chapter ends with the reader making a single quilt square, on the page, based on the that chapter's theme, using any artistic technique. At the end of the book is a page (called "stitching it all together") for the reader to assemble the quilt, cutting out all the squares from the sequence of chapters, and assembling them into a unified quilt.
Creating the quilt leads to writing what Knott calls a "gentle manifesto," a personal statement "to serve as a beacon of your personal values and your unique rendering of what it means to feel well, online and offline."
