What's the connection between Social Media and ADHD?

[Grant Crowell]

I’m doing volunteer research and reporting on what affect social media has on ADHD adults (for better or worse), and how social media professionals with ADHD can do their jobs better without succumbing to the many easy distractions that social media and online networking can sometimes create. I’d be interested to learn what resources are available on this rather under-discussed topic?

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[Wgreen]

Oh boy. Now there’s a topic. I wouldn’t know where to point you, but I’m sure if you did some online digging, you could find several good resources. Right off the bat, I think social media jobs could pose several challenges for ADDers. First, it can be addictive, and ADDers are easy prey for distractions. It’s like being asked to throw out old magazines: the job is to get rid of ’em; but we end up stopping every 30 seconds to read ’em. An hour after we start, there are maybe ten old magazines in the recycling bin. But I think a great danger lurks in social media’s very ethos—it tempts people to interact by responding quickly to (potentially) a landslide of posts. For anybody with a foot-in-mouth disorder, this can be lethal. I can see where an ADDer responsible for managing a company’s FB page could, let’s say, stray off message. Still, I don’t know. Social media management might be a great job for an ADDer—it’s repetitive but not tedious, it’s generally executed in short bursts of activity, and it requires creativity. So…
Tell us what you find.

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[Grant Crowell]

Thanks for your feedback and insight! I wholly agree with you on how Social Media poses special opportunities and challenges to ADDers — perhaps an ideal industry to actually work in, if you can only remember to not be impulsive and immediately react to things without thinking them through just a bit. Fortunately I have found a good resource with Peter Shankman, founder of HARO (Help a Reporter) who gave a presentation on ADHD and Social Media back in 2012 for a Learning Disabilities conference. There’s a recorded audio and I’m talking with the organizer of the event this Friday. Also, I believe Peter has mentioned his ADHD condition on his own site, so I’ll check out his past blog posts on that as well.  Just that along with comments like yours, should provide a very helpful post! Hopefully the folks at TotallyADD will link to it and promote is as well. 🙂

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[MarieAngell]

Grant, as with anything, ideal career paths vary depending on the person. I’m quite active in social media and understand and enjoy it, but there are aspects of social media work that I find tedious (various metrics and deep data analysis, for example).

In my case, my ADHD serves me well in that I can have fleeting interactions that build into online relationships over time.  I actually began using social media to promote my band rather than for personal use, so I got a lot of good practice in being appropriate. I’ve retained a good level of control over what I say, even when using social media personally. And, of course, the kind of background I had in PR and business served me well, too.

I do have to be very careful about not getting caught up in social media and letting one thing lead to another, wasting all day on the computer. This happens quite a lot to me and I think it can be a real problem for anyone, though especially for ADDers. If you’re working in social media, it’s a job requiring focus like anything else.

Also, there are different kinds of social media jobs now. Some require intense computer time and others require some socializing with people in real life.  So anyone going into social media as a career needs to evaluate strengths and weakness.

To sum up, careers in social media can be great for ADDers but I don’t think there is any one career that’s perfect for all ADDers.

 

 

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