The other day, Malobee wrote a very thought-provoking post about temporarily leaving behind social media[1] based on a different post on Medium by Devon Price[2].
[1] My Month of Sanity & Not Posting: A Social Media Power User Chooses to Touch Some Grass
[2] My Week of Sanity & Not Posting
Reading through these and looking at the rules being laid out, I started thinking on the way I personally make use of social media. I'm not what I would describe as a power user. While I have various social media accounts, I rarely ever make posts on them or check my personal feeds. Part of the reason I laid this gemlog out for myself as "not a place to talk about my projects or journal my daily life" is I personally dislike the idea of using the internet for social validation. That isn't to say I never post things I've made to the internet or toss thoughts on my day out to others, but when I do I prefer to do so within specific Discord servers filled with people I know and enjoy speaking with in the same way you might call up a friend or a family member IRL for a chat.
The problem I've always seen with social media is that it expands the relevant social circle to an unknowable amount of strangers, the majority of whom you'll never interact with in any meaningful way. Clout-chasing is the act of trying to gain praise and validation from vast numbers of people you don't know and whose opinions should usually hold very little value to you. And even if you're merely reading social media there's an endless amount of content out there, which means endless ways to burn your time on something actively unimportant or even destructive, and an even more endless amount of negativity and public opinion you can be sucked into. If you don't know who these hundreds of people are, why do you need to care what they think about a movie that just came out or something a celebrity said?
With all this said I do find myself randomly scrolling through Twitter to avoid mild levels of boredom sometimes, and that's a habit I fully intend to break, but given how infrequently I turn to standard social media something entirely different stood out to me as a habit to break myself off.
When I find myself even moderately bored, my first instinct is usually to put on my headphones and turn to Youtube. Compared to nearly any other activity, watching videos is easy. With very little to process and often very little to think about, it typically requires almost no mental effort. That isn't to say that all video is a waste of time, or that it's impossible for visual media to make you think- video is endlessly useful for telling stories or conveying information that's difficult to understand without seeing it in motion- but most video on the internet is garbage.
When I say "garbage" here, I mean in the same way that Bennet Foddy uses the term in the voiceover of Getting Over It: most content becomes garbage as soon as it hits the internet in the same way that a delicious plate of spaghetti becomes garbage as soon as it hits the kitchen sink, or in the same way that assorted knickknacks become garbage when stored in the house of a hoarder. It's not to say there's no inherent value, but with years worth of media being pushed online every day it's uncountably impossible for one person to see all there is to see and most of it only registers as "important" for a very brief period before being replaced by the newest, shiniest thing. When I spend hours scrolling through random Youtube videos from creators I've never seen before, covering topics I'm only slightly interested in, I'm filling my mind with garbage in exactly the same way the social media addict fills their mind with garbage through endlessly scrolling.
There are good portions of Youtube as well, of course. There are several channels I follow which produce content I consider to be on par with the average television show, and as long as it's handled responsibly I see no more problem with moderate use of Youtube than I do with keeping up with an ongoing TV series. The problem is that I've gone beyond moderate use and started scrolling through Youtube recommendations when I would rather be doing something entirely different.
With that in mind, I'm setting myself the same challenge but tweaking the rules for my personal situation. Given that several of the original rules don't apply to me, I'm going to be using the following:
I will be attempting to follow these rules for one week starting from today- the challenge ends the morning of the 27th. I don't expect it to be easy to follow these rules, and as with Dr. Price's week of sanity there may be some moments that skirt the spirit of the challenge, but if I can pull it off I fully expect to see at least a minor positive change in my attention span and focus.
__________________ Have any thoughts on our modern relationship with social media? Feel free to send me an email.