Why a Blog?

Transitioning Away from Social Media

When I had the thought to create Climate Health Nurse in 2019-2020, the idea started out as an informational Instagram account and was met with general positivity from the people around me. This was encouraging from the start, but I found quickly that Instagram was becoming oversaturated with content and Meta was encouraging new content creators to pay the company to get more engagement and visibility.

I thought it wise to have a running blog even if engagement in the form of views, likes, comments was lower, because I wanted individual ownership of my content that is not subject to algorithms run by social media companies. During Instagram's early days, likely before 2019, there seemed to be a lot of informational posts, artwork and zine accounts, and affinity groups that fostered a sense of community and learning. These days, the platform has become more overrun with bots, scammers, AI-generated content, stolen artwork, disturbing memes, and plenty of misinformation and disinformation that is programmed to get more engagement than nuanced, well-researched, scientific content. These days, we rarely see photos and videos from our friends anymore, and we are pushed advertisements perhaps every 30 seconds or more.

This was even more discouraging for myself, from the perspective of someone with the intention of being a content creator. I had prepared to make more square graphics discussing topics like antibiotic resistance and superfund sites, but the ideas I had sat in my Drafts folder and became moot as Instagram began to prioritize Reels and video content. As I focused on studying for my classes and board exams, making sure I was doing as much as I could for my patients as a student nurse, and getting enough sleep to be awake for my clinical rotations, the platform continued punishing creators who did not post frequently because their content would start to get less and less visibility with fewer posts. I felt too overwhelmed to make a pivot towards recording videos or producing animation.

I realized that I was competing with full-time creators and companies with entire marketing/branding teams on Instagram, and quickly learned how my plans to promote content would fall apart. If nobody saw my graphics, there would still be a steady stream of content on everyone's feeds. The things that I talked about or created would never be promoted or brought back to the surface, buried because of the sheer volume of new things that continued being posted every day - almost like water spraying out of a fire hose. I simply didn't have the time. I wanted Climate Health Nurse to be a passion project that may never be monetized. While studying and practicing nursing, I didn't have the bandwidth to be a full time content creator and social media manager all in one. There is a huge amount of creative energy and work needed to making an effective social media presence, and I've met some dedicated, talented people who do make it happen - proving that it's truly a full-time job.

I also noticed that I often scrolled through my social media feeds during slower parts of the workday or commutes, and sometimes found a post or video I thought was useful or informational that I'd want to reference later. However, by the time I got home, I'd usually completely forget about those things and end up grabbing dinner and jumping into the shower. No matter what Instagram personally presented to me, it never quite "stuck" enough that I'd donate to the majority of causes I interacted with, look up a scientific study that piqued my interest, or try a new pasta recipe I found. In other words, I was never significantly motivated to leave the app and apply myself. Other content creators in the social good sphere have detailed how apps like Instagram and TikTok are designed to keep users within the same environment with other user interface quirks like the banning of hyperlinks in captions. So many times, myself or a friend would exclaim that they have a funny video that they want to share, then scroll through their archives and likes for what seems like forever before realizing that video was a cultural moment that disappeared into the abyss, never to resurface again as a reference tool or object of relevance.

I want to intentionally provide my own thoughts and resources that link out to different webpages across the Internet, much like Wikipedia. It may be easier to make false assertions or emotionally inflammatory comments on an app where it's harder to fact-check, but that's not what I want to do. I prioritize intentionality and slowness rather than mindless scrolling. Having a blog or a website allows the owner of the content and ideas to decide how much advertising they want on it, and say what they want when they want to, without running into this frantic pressure of needing to churn out content in order to keep a high follower count. It also means that I can easily find whatever I post, and easily send the hyperlink to others who want to reference resources instead of losing them to the Internet. I trust that the people who are interested in reading what I have to say will keep my site bookmarked, or ask me what I'm writing about!

Touching Grass

In our house, we have had discussions about the impact of access to limitless content through the Internet. Even though it was a tough pill to swallow, my husband explained that the majority of people who use social media such as Instagram or TikTok use the same sort of language and rhetoric that any drug addict would use: denial of the harms, justification of negative impacts, continued use despite worsening anxiety and depression.

Lately, the act of blogging, even if infrequently, has taught me the important lesson that when researching what to write and putting essays together, I made a lot of assumptions about 25-50% of what I hear online just because someone I didn’t personally know “posted about it.” I might know about the general facts (e.g. this specific product has a correlation with increased cancer risks) but not the specific details surrounding what happened (what types of studies were done to measure this risk, what regulations countries have put into place to mitigate this risk, whether there were other confounders, etc.).

The process of reading about news articles to fact-check things before I blogged about them gave me more nuance and perspective that I severely lacked from just absorbing hearsay on Instagram Reels or any sort of short-form content. It made me realize that the people around me were also likely repeating talking points they'd heard, but hadn't investigated or thought critically about. I remembered projects I did in or after college such as a video interview assessing people's perceptions on the 2010 BP Oil Spill five years after the incident, or a podcast on understanding how Asian-Americans felt about the 2022 case against Harvard University to end affirmative action. I learned that few people think about how US Gulf Fisheries suffered revenue losses estimated at 3.7 billion dollars as a result of the oil spill, or the fact that Edward Blum, the lawyer that led the charge for the Asian-American students was the same guy that represented "Becky with the Bad Grades". These details reveal critical nuances about disasters and legal strategy that teach us so much about our world and the way people think and move about it - things not so easily captured by a headline.

As I sketched out the outlines for my blogs and thought about what I wanted my thesis statements to be, or what points I wanted to drive home, I also realized that I was quite out of practice and needed to exercise my long-form writing muscle that had atrophied since my undergraduate days. I write daily but only in short-form notes for charts that explain my medical decision-making, and it was still a large jump to formulate entire arguments and put them together again. It was a lot easier for me to watch videos and listen to what others had to say, instead of thinking my own thoughts. This was a wake-up call for me. I’m a Millennial that has a doctorate degree and I’ve been taught the importance of evidence-based medicine, and it's still blindingly easy to slip into absorbing the opinions that those around me espouse, regardless of whether they are evidence-based or whether I knew any further details about them. If we are wasting our time engaging with half-baked ideas and not purposefully elaborating and forming our own opinions, what even is the point of being “informed” online?

While I hope that my friends learn something from my blog, the act of blogging has become a hobby. It's something I can do for fun, but it's also a way for me to engage critically with the information around me, and it's almost a meditative practice of sustaining my attention and thinking strategically about what's to come.