🙃 Is Leaving Social Media a Privilege? — with Shivani Bhatia
Welcome to Off the Grid, a podcast for small business owners who want to leave social media without losing all their clients.
Amelia Hruby:Hello. Hello. Welcome or welcome back to off the grid. I'm your host, Emilia Frooby. And here on this show, I share stories, strategies, and experiments for growing your business with radical generosity and energetic sovereignty.
Amelia Hruby:Typically, we release episodes every Wednesday while we're in season, but this season, I am experimenting with some Friday episodes because there are just so many amazing conversations and questions and reflections that I wanna share with all of you. So you might have noticed that I've added a monthly biz forecast episode on the 1st Friday of each month, and I was thinking I also might pop in some other Friday chats on the 3rd Friday of each month. So today is going to be the first one of those. And in this bonus episode, I am joined by my biz friend, Shivani Bhatia. Shivani is a health equity expert and diversity, equity, and inclusion strategist living and working in New York City.
Amelia Hruby:She's also a doula. And in her own beautiful words, she shares, I'm a maker and a mender, a queer disabled brown femme, an eldest immigrant daughter, and an equity and justice consultant. I work to nourish my communities and heal our systems of care in pursuit of health equity and racial disability and reproductive justice. Shivani is one of the amazing, beautiful people that I've had the honor of meeting through this podcast. And after I released my conversation with Amanda Laird, Shivani reached out and wanted to share more thoughts on the last question Amanda and I talked about, which was the question of, is leaving social media a privilege?
Amelia Hruby:So in this bonus episode, Shivani is gonna help me ask the question, and we're gonna explore it with a few definitions of power, of privilege, and of social capital, and kind of unravel what we think the question behind the question may be. And then at the end of our conversation, we also kind of move this question out of the small business sphere, which, of course, is primarily where we hang out on the show. And I share a little bit more about how I'm thinking about social media use in my personal life and in alignment with my political values these days, particularly in light of the many political violences and atrocities that we're witnessing around the world right now. So if you wanna hear a health equity expert and a philosopher walk into a virtual studio and hang out for 30 minutes and talk about these ideas, keep listening. And if you don't, there's a whole new episode of Off the Grid headed your way next week.
Amelia Hruby:Alright. Let's dive in to my conversation with Shivani. Hi, Shivani. Welcome to Off the Grid.
Shivani Bhatia:Hi, Amelia. I'm so excited.
Amelia Hruby:Yeah. Me too. I am super pumped for this special bonus conversation that we're having. One day I have to have you on the show to actually talk about all your work, but this just felt too present and exciting. Like, we needed to talk about it now.
Shivani Bhatia:Immediately. Yep. Right away.
Amelia Hruby:So you're here today to help me go deeper into this question that I've actually raised at the end of 2 interviews now, which is the question of, is leaving social media a privilege? We started unpacking this in our Boxer chat this week and I was like, you got to come share this wisdom on the show. So I wanted to invite you to kind of kick us off with this question by taking us into an even bigger question, which is, like, what is privilege, and how does privilege relate to power?
Shivani Bhatia:Yeah. Oh, I love these questions so much. And it was as soon as you asked those questions on the episode, I was like, but what even is privilege? How like, is social media privilege? Well, how do we even talk about that?
Shivani Bhatia:And of course, me being me, I, like, had to immediately go and research everything. Yes. I love it. I think the the question of privilege to me was like a definition that I actually was kind of struggling with for a while. I was like, what is the difference between privilege and power?
Shivani Bhatia:And is the question of privilege one that we're really asking? Or is it the question of power? And so when I looked up definitions of privilege, I teach it and, like, have been studying it as unearned power, benefits, advantages, access, resources that are available or exist for people of dominant groups. And it's either groups that they're actually part of or groups that they're perceived to be part of, which I think is like an interesting piece about privilege is, like, is it real or is it perceived? Can they maybe both be the same thing sometimes?
Shivani Bhatia:Power, which I think is, like, beneath all of this, is, like, that unearned power, unearned resources. I really use Alicia Garza's definition of power a lot. Alicia Garza is, the co creator and co founder of the Black Lives Matter hashtag and movement. And she wrote this book called the purpose of power, where she really goes into the definition of it and the differences between power and empowerment, which is also, like, another sort of thing we could talk about. But Alicia Garza defines power as the ability to make decisions that affect your own life and the lives of others, the freedom to shape and determine the story of who we are.
Shivani Bhatia:And then she goes on to say, power also means having the ability to reward and punish and decide how resources are distributed. And I love this definition so much because I think it gets at this, like, material resource piece that, like, can you actually decide who gets what? Can you actually shape your own life, both in the story of it and, like, how you talk about it, but also in the lived reality and lived experience of it. She also talks, quite a bit more in the book and in some articles that I've read about it, about this this piece about the ability to reward and punish, which I think is really fascinating. And if we, like, apply this to social media, is is it a reward to show up on social media?
Shivani Bhatia:Is it a punishment to step away from social media or to, like, deprive people of access to you in these, like, parasocial relationships sorts of ways. I think there's a lot that we could talk about in that. And then the the other piece that I think is really important is this difference between power and the feeling of empowerment. So she she takes out the, like, the idea that power is a feeling that we have. It's not a feeling.
Shivani Bhatia:It's, like, actual material resources. It's not a good or bad thing in and of itself. It's just the resources themselves. And the feeling of empowerment is, I think, the thing that we often think of as power of, like, I feel I feel like I am in control of my life. That's actually a feeling of empowerment.
Shivani Bhatia:I feel like I'm in control of how I show up on social media, what I use. Do I have the choice to step away from it? Some of that might be, like, a real and actual choice, and some of that might be, do I feel empowered to step away or to engage with it?
Amelia Hruby:Yeah. Oh my gosh. My mind is already spinning in so many different directions about how to apply these definitions in this context, so let me just blurt it all out, and then we'll make some sense of it together. Sounds good. The first thing that was coming to mind with this definition of power as having the power to reward and punish, to distribute resources is that on social media platforms, all of that power resides in the platform itself and the people who run the platform.
Amelia Hruby:Like, we don't actually have control over who our things get shown to, what who they're shared with, how far they go, if they're boosted in the algorithm or not. Like, none of that's in our control. So while we can certainly work on our mindset and our behavior on these platforms and in relationship to them, we can feel more empowered in our behaviors. At the end of the day, the platforms hold the power. Even in, like, getting locked out of your platform, they have all the power.
Shivani Bhatia:Completely. And, like, the what is then the perception of power that people have within that. Right? If we, like, in capitalist society, people with money have power, that is billionaires. Those are those are, you know, institutions that have access to that kind of money.
Shivani Bhatia:It's not the individual people. When people say eat the rich, it's not, you know, somebody who's making ends meet. What we're talking about is people who are flying private jets for 5 minutes. You know? Like, that's a very different scale.
Shivani Bhatia:And so we end up in these conversations of, like, do I have the power to leave this platform or to stay on this platform? When the actual question of power or, like, an actually interesting interrogation of power is is in these institutions, is in these these companies or corporations that get to define a lot of that or that take have the power to define a lot of that for us.
Amelia Hruby:Yeah. I think another layer I was thinking about while you were sharing these definitions was about the earned and unearnedness of privilege. And I think that when I'm reflecting on the conversations I had with Amanda and with Kristen about this, that was actually a part of the crux of it, was people's relationships to their followings because some people relate to their social media following as something they've worked really hard to gain and thus have earned. And other people are much more quickly to be like, the platform gave me this for posting some cool stuff 10 years ago. Like, I didn't do anything to earn this.
Amelia Hruby:And there's something I think really in that then when you think about leaving. Like, is your relationship to well, this was, like, this unearned benefit I have, or other people are perceiving it as an unearned benefit, and therefore, they're bringing that into their perception or into their judgment of how I behave in relationship to it. Like, I think that is super wrapped up in this question, this idea of, like, do we earn a social media following? Oh. That language doesn't feel right to me, but, like, I think it's very relevant here.
Shivani Bhatia:Yeah. I this is this is so fascinating because what it what's making me think of too is this next piece around social capital. And, like, do we can we earn people is really at kind of the heart of that question. Yeah. I think the answer is no.
Shivani Bhatia:I think the answer is we don't. Right? Like, if we are operating in a consent based relational experience, like, everybody consents to showing up in relationship in the ways that they want to or don't want to. To. People have the rights to be in the kinds of relationships that they do or don't wanna be in.
Shivani Bhatia:That that is like a that is an energetic sovereignty thing. That's an autonomy sort of thing. Right? That is something that we all have as a very fundamental human right. I think what gets tricky about it in this era of social media following is is this piece of social capital, which is, like, well, maybe we'll get into definitions of social capital.
Amelia Hruby:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Let's go into that. So tell me more, like, what is the definition of social capital Yeah.
Amelia Hruby:And how does that play into this?
Shivani Bhatia:Okay. Disclaimer. I'm not a sociologist. I'm not an economist. So to grain of salt, this is, like, me learning out loud.
Amelia Hruby:I'm a philosopher. Concepts mean everything and nothing to me.
Shivani Bhatia:Great. Fantastic. Yeah. I was when I started to go into this, I took it in a couple different ways. I first learned about it in the public health world.
Shivani Bhatia:So that's my background is is in the community engagement sort of world where community is a resource in the sense of the depth and meaningfulness of your relationships with community and the authenticity of that engagement, is a resource in the sense of it's like a it's, something you can access. It's something that, gives you access to other parts of the world it gives you or other experiences or from a public health sort of perspective, it, like, makes your research better. It makes your work better. It makes your programs better. It makes you better able to serve, people in the ways that they want to be served or have that exchange be a little bit better.
Shivani Bhatia:So I first learned about it in that context where the priority of social capital and the the definition of it really came from the depth of that relationship and the authenticity of that relationship. When I went down this, like, rabbit hole of research, into the economics sort of version of it, it is really sold in that capital part of it, which is in, you know, all about capitalism. It's all about economics. It's all about what financially do you have resources to because of the people that you're in relationship with. So this one definition that I found, which is, I think, a 1986 definition from this French, sociologist is, around the idea that, like, social capital is the actual and potential resources that you have that are based on your membership in a group.
Shivani Bhatia:And the way that that credential, quote, unquote, entitles you to credit in the various senses of the word and various sense of the word credit. And I it's a very, like, economic based definition. There's another one that I found that is, like, social relationships are resources that leads the development and accumulation of human capital. And again, this is like thinking about this very transactional version of relationships where it is, if I have better relationships, if I have more more relationships, I can get more for myself. I think it's very inextricably linked from everything that we've talked about, that you've talked about on this podcast about capitalism and how capitalism informs growth and transactional, Bear Hebert has talked a lot about this, like, value of capitalism as uninterrupted growth that you have to always be growing.
Shivani Bhatia:You have to always be getting something out of whatever you're putting into it. And so I'm I'm, like, very hesitant to even go too far into this idea of social capital because I think it can really lead us to that transactional sort of space. But I think if we if we take it back into this balance between, like, social capital is a form of power. If social capital is a form of power, what all does that bring us towards? What all does that give us access to in both the relational and and potentially realistically in the financial?
Shivani Bhatia:If you have a platform, we talked about this a little bit with publishing. If you have a platform, you might have access to resources, or decision making that you might not have access to otherwise.
Amelia Hruby:Yeah. I think that publishing is a really good example here because we also see the shift in different meanings of social capital. So when I think of social capital, sometimes I almost sum it up as just, like, it's all about who you know, and the ways that there are very real gatekeepers in our world. And knowing those people and carrying their favor can yield huge financial or relational or other results for you and help you grow in those ways, like, in the capitalist sense of more money, more influence, more power.
Shivani Bhatia:Yeah.
Amelia Hruby:And I think part of what we see with publishing is this real shift, or this shift in real time over the past decade from it being all about finding the right gatekeepers and getting through those gates, 2, social media, people will use the word democratizing that, by which I think they just mean that the gatekeepers lost a lot of power because when people could quantify their followings and say, here are 10,000 people, a 100,000 people, a 1000000 people paying attention to me, that started to be more meaningful than simply the judgment of 1 editor or one gatekeeper in the space. Because there is this conclusion drawn that more followers meant more books sold. And so now the way all of that has played out is we see writers being told things like you need at least 10,000 followers before you'll ever find an agent or get a book deal. Because the gatekeeper of a editor or publisher or agent has been replaced by the gate of a social media following. And I do think that's all about social capital, but it's just less about these, like, specific gatekeeper relationships and more now about the quantity of people that you can claim are paying attention to your work.
Amelia Hruby:Mhmm. Even as we all know, it's a total facade. Like, even as the same people who are like, here are my 10,000 followers, 20 of them liked my last post. Like, you see that happen. I see it all the time.
Amelia Hruby:Even on the episode with Kristen, she very transparently shared, like, I have 58,000 followers, maybe 200 people watch my stories. Like, we know it's a facade, but it is still the, like, currency, the social capital that we're working with, I think particularly in publishing, but in many other spaces as well.
Shivani Bhatia:Yeah. I think it really flattens our understanding of what aspect of the relationship is important and, like, what aspect of the social capital is important. Is it the quantity of people that you have paying attention? Is it the quality of the relationship that they have with you and that you have with them? And maybe it maybe it's both.
Shivani Bhatia:Maybe there's some aspect of both that is important or interesting or useful when we translate it to the things that we wanna do in our lives, whether it's publish a book or run a business or have better relationships or whatever the thing might be. But it it I think it really it flattens that out into this performative sort of thing and also into this, like, we talked a little bit about, like, proxies and proxy variables for things. Like, what we're what we're pointing to is a number that we can look at and say, hey. This this number means something, and we're maybe making it mean a lot more than what it actually means. We're looking at that 100,000, like, 100 k on Instagram and saying, that means that people are paying attention to you and people care about you and you are important.
Shivani Bhatia:That's really what we're saying. It's like, you have power. You are important in this particular way. And I think it's worth interrogating. Does that 100 k actually mean that?
Shivani Bhatia:Do those 100,000 people really feel that way about you? Do they actually take that? We, like, also know that people get more hate comments when things go when, like, numbers go up like that. Right? People get less engagement.
Shivani Bhatia:People maybe have to have stronger boundaries around the kind of work that they put out into the world, the depth of intimacy that that they go into those relationships with. And, again, those could be good or bad things. Those are not necessarily things that we can, like, place a binary value judgment on. They're just, like, different points of context to to, I think, bring to that number.
Amelia Hruby:Yeah. I feel like it works something like like your follower count is a metric that's a symbol of your social capital, and then your social capital is a proxy for how much capital you can make for these other people. And so it just it becomes so just, like, clearly blindly capitalist when I start to break it down in some of these terms.
Shivani Bhatia:Yeah.
Amelia Hruby:And it loses what where you started, like, with your understanding of social capital. Like, community is a resource. I believe that. But what makes it so special as a resource is that it cannot simply be commodified and traded. In that way, maybe it's not a material resource in a certain, like, capitalist definition of material.
Amelia Hruby:Like, we have to refuse the idea or the practice of human capital of, like, making other people capital because when we start to do this, like, on social media even, our followers just become the currency that we're using to get what we want. And it's so transactional. And we really do turn people into human capital and, like, diminish their autonomy, their authority, their energetic sovereignty, just like their human beingness. And I'm not saying this to, like, make anybody feel bad. Right?
Amelia Hruby:Like, we are taught and trained into this. Like, I'm not here to be, like, you're on social media. You have more than 10,000 followers. You're, like, a bad capitalist. No.
Amelia Hruby:Like, no. Or you wanna book deals, so you're working really hard at this. Like, no. That doesn't it's not a value judgment of you or your actions. I'm just trying to paint a picture of, like, the system that we've all kind of been conscripted in through social media, like as creators or small business owners on these platforms particularly, like the ways that we get coerced into diminishing other people into this, like, number that we then use to curry favor with the platform gatekeeper and, also, maybe these other still human gatekeepers that are hanging out, telling us what we can or can't do or have.
Shivani Bhatia:Completely. Completely. Yeah. I mean, I think I the thing that came up for me while you were saying that too is I I think the that we don't have to look that far back into where this came from to say Yeah. You know, we have a 4 100, 500 year history of colonization and chattel slavery.
Shivani Bhatia:And, and we're seeing a lot of that kind of happen in the world right now in terms of how people are traded or or how money is placed over human life as a a valuable thing. Mhmm. And so and not to, you know, compare social media followings to a genocide that's happening, but also to say, like, these are these are patterns and narrative threads that carry through and I think are derived from some very similar places. And so if if we can actually get at the heart of the question of, like, is leaving social media a privilege, what we're actually asking is what kind of power do we have access to because of the relationships that we're in? What kind of power do we have access to?
Shivani Bhatia:And how do we choose to use that power? How do we choose to steward that power well, when we have access to it, whether that is a kind of social power, whether that's an economic power, whether that's any other form of power. I think that is like a much more interesting question that we can be asking and and working with to say, okay. And how does that how does that shape the choices that we make? How does that shape how we show up online in our businesses, in the kind of work that we do, in the art that we make, or in our relationships?
Amelia Hruby:This latter piece is something that came up in my conversation with Kristen as well. And I think I inarticulately tried to get at there, which is that I think it's helpful to see this system. It's helpful to see the way that capitalism plays out on these social media platforms, that the idea of social capital is being deployed there through us, even through our actions. And then also to recognize where we do have privilege in these systems, and then what is our role, like, is leaving social media a privilege? And the argument I tried to make there is, like, well, if we are realizing that we have this privilege, how are we then deploying that privilege?
Amelia Hruby:And I think one of the ways you can choose to do that is to leave and to say, like, I have this privilege, and therefore I can divest from this system, and I will divest from this system.
Shivani Bhatia:Yeah.
Amelia Hruby:So I think that divestment can be a really effective strategy through which to deploy privilege in a different, like, direction, like, to change, like, the rules of the game, to exit Not that we can exit capitalism as a power structure, but we can say, like, in this instance, I'm not doing this anymore. Insert Instagram, TikTok, YouTube for this. And I'm going to try to become an example of a different way that this is possible. I mean, that's the whole premise of this podcast is, like, right, we can put our privilege and our power to use in other ways and places than social media. And I think that okay.
Amelia Hruby:I'm gonna, like, total lava curveball into this. I can't wait. And I've also been thinking about this question, like, from a couple different positions. Like, for me as a business owner, it feels very clear that, like, one of the best ways I can use my economic power is to, like, just divest from social media entirely, to not be present here, to show that I can, like, earn and redistribute without having to demonstrate that I have social capital in this specific platform or multiple specific platforms. But when I think about myself as a person sometimes, and I think about, like, my personal values, my political values, and the role that social media plays in our, like, global politics.
Amelia Hruby:Yeah. I have asked myself specifically in relationship to the genocides that we're watching happen globally right now. Like, is leaving social media a refusal to witness? And I do think that witnessing is a very important political act, particularly witnessing and standing up against genocide. And I do see the ways that social media is a place where so much is being shared and shown behind these, like, very strongly articulated propagandas.
Amelia Hruby:Mhmm. Mhmm. You know, to be explicit, like, social media gives us a window through Israeli propaganda. And I have asked myself, like, am I stepping back from something I should be witnessing by not being on these platforms?
Shivani Bhatia:That's a big and important question.
Amelia Hruby:I guess I just wanna be willing to ask it from of myself.
Shivani Bhatia:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think it it goes to it goes to kind of where we started, which is what is the power that we actually have and how are we using it? And social media in and of itself is a tool or a portal through which we might be able to access certain kinds of power. But it's it's almost like a less interesting question in and of itself.
Shivani Bhatia:Right? The tool the tool itself doesn't matter as much. The thing behind that that we're actually trying to understand or unpack or make decisions about or make value judgments for ourselves around is what are the choices that we make? How do we where do we have the ability to reward, punish, or allocate resources? It's the first part of this definition.
Shivani Bhatia:Right? Power is the ability to make decisions that affect your own life and the lives of others, the freedom to shape and determine the story of who we are. Right? The story of who we are is the interesting part in that definition as it relates to witnessing. Mhmm.
Shivani Bhatia:My, like, work in equity and practice around equity and justice work started in death work. I started in in, maternal mortality prevention, and my job was witnessing deaths, essentially. It was, like, record keeping and storytelling around people's deaths. And there was a lot of questions around who gets to tell stories and why, what happens when you get to tell a story, for somebody who's no longer there, for someone who cannot tell their own story, any actively anymore. And what happens when we're, like, explicitly piecing together secondhand details of everyone else's telling of the story.
Shivani Bhatia:It was a lot of medical records and police records sometimes and and just all these other kind of secondary pieces that we would put together to, like, make determinations about how a person had died. And a lot of my practicing of witnessing and, like, my understanding of witnessing that I'm doing now in terms of witnessing a genocide comes from that study of these very individual deaths. And it also is really informed by being a birth doula, which is a very similar kind of witnessing. It's a very it's a it's the same practice of showing up and holding space in a very different context. Mhmm.
Shivani Bhatia:So, yeah, I think I have also seen a lot of my my role in understanding what's happening right now to be witnessing of a genocide and and that that is like, there's a record keeping in that. There's a storytelling in that that feels important and necessary. And also something that's being asked of us, of those of us with privilege that we that we should be showing up in this way, that we should be witnessing and and carrying those stories forward. And I think social media is a tool for that. It is something that's given us access to that.
Shivani Bhatia:And it's an important question to ask, but it's not like the be all end all question to ask, you know?
Amelia Hruby:Yeah, absolutely. I really appreciate your perspective on this, and it feels very aligned with where I've found myself. As you shared, I was realizing that, like, part of why my resources have kind of like, my personal experience has been failing me on this question is because my primary practice of witnessing has been witnessing through close relationships with people who are incarcerated Mhmm. And, like, building those pen pal relationships and becoming close with people where they're not able to use social media. So it's actually, like, not played a role in the act of witnessing in this way.
Amelia Hruby:I think what you shared helped me realize I've thought of that practice as extremely different from the call to witness genocide in Gaza, but actually it's not that different now that I start I can draw parallels at least. Like, I can start to think about that. And I do think that I'm trying to hold the paradox of the fact that social media is a place that people can go to to share outside of institutions while also knowing that the platforms that are the social media spaces are like inherently, in my opinion, implicated in these capitalist, white supremacist, patriarchal, oppressive systems. Right? And like, I think that that is just something attention I have to sit with.
Amelia Hruby:Yeah. It's like, yes, I wanna opt out of social media. Also, I don't want that to mean that the only place that I, like, get coverage of what's happening in Palestine is the New York Times. Right? So, yeah, these are just all questions I'm holding that feel related, and I think are things that come up.
Amelia Hruby:It all arises in this seemingly innocuous or silly question of, is leaving social media a privilege? Yeah. Because it depends on what perspective we come to it from. Like, is it a privilege as a human being? Is it a privilege as a business owner?
Amelia Hruby:Is it a privilege as an influencer? Is it a privilege as someone who is yeah. There's any of these things all at once? All of these things at once?
Shivani Bhatia:All of these things at once.
Amelia Hruby:But I really appreciate how you've come to help us all think about this through these lenses or these specific definitions of privilege and power and social capital, and I think for both of us I can say it hasn't led to any prescriptive decisions. It's not like we're here to say what anyone should or shouldn't do, I'm struggling with what I should or shouldn't do, but I think that it's really this conversation, and I appreciate it so much.
Shivani Bhatia:Thanks. I'm so thrilled to explore some of these questions with you. And I think the I I I feel like the biggest takeaway is that there is no binary answer. There's no such thing as perfect in this. Right?
Shivani Bhatia:There is no there is no one answer that will always work behind any of this. So the question behind the question is always what are we doing with the power that we do have access to and how are we living at our values with that power?
Amelia Hruby:Thank you so much, Shivani, for being here. Thank you, listeners, for tuning in to this conversation with us or for asking these questions with us. And I just can't wait to have you on the podcast for, like, a full interview and episode, which will certainly happen in the near or not so distant future.
Shivani Bhatia:Thanks, Emilia. I can't wait.
Speaker 1:Thanks for listening to Off the Grid. Don't forget to grab your free leaving social media toolkit at offthegrid.fun/ toolkit. This podcast is a Softer Sounds production. Our music is by Melissa Caitlin Carter of Making Audio Magic, and our logo is by Natalia Studio. I'm your host, Emilia Frooby, and until next time, I'll see you off the grid and on the interweb.
Shivani Bhatia:Really wanna put your phone away. Yeah. Let's go off the grid.
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