As you know by now, my social media app of choice is Twitter. There’s something about the way the individual posts are presented that I really enjoy. It’s my favorite source of information when it comes to current events, in large part because of its accessibility to all people, almost like a democratization of the public discussion. But it’s also definitely a two-way street.
The data detox I participated in a couple weeks ago really brought my obsession with being on top of current events to my attention. There’s obviously always something happening in the world, but I’m not giving myself the ability to parse through what deserves my attention and what is just more noise. Like so many people, I’m consuming information for the sake of consuming, desperate to not be left behind. But what’s wrong with learning about the Gamestop stock saga two weeks too late? Is it truly detrimental to my emotional state if I find out that Lady Gaga’s dogs were stolen a few days after it happened – especially if the article I read is saying she already got them back?
More generally, is keeping up with public outrage actually doing anything productive? It’s important to be informed, but there’s a difference between being informed and being entertained. At what point am I sufficiently informed? And am I just mindlessly scrolling after I hit that point?
Everyone loves grandstanding, especially when it confirms your personal views. But that’s not how real conversations work. That’s what makes reality television not actually reality: people aren’t constantly screaming at each other for hours on end without reaching any kind of understanding. The philosophers Justin Tosi and Brandon Warmke have proposed the useful phrase “moral grandstanding” to describe what happens when people use moral talk to enhance their prestige in a public forum. It’s human nature to want to gossip and ostracize, but social media has ratcheted up that blood lust to 11. It’s all too easy to channel your frustration into venting at a faceless stranger behind a screen, and I don’t think it’s groundbreaking to say that is definitely not healthy. Social media has turned communicating into a public performance.
I don’t think it’s surprising that I and many other people get caught up in the drama of social media. Clive Thompson talks about how the reverse chronological way social media displays information makes it harder and harder to examine the past. I could not agree more. I’ve lost countless hours scrolling and scrolling trying to find an article or a tweet I forgot to bookmark and come up short. This is obviously a terrible model for spreading information. It also tends to smother important movements that deserve to be in the public eye. I am bitterly reminded of how quickly the media stopped covering Black Lives Matter and the pursuit of justice for victims of police brutality after corporations slapped END RACISM stickers on products and more engaging events came along.
Combining this counterintuitive model with people who feed off social outrage and interaction by any means possible is a recipe for nothing productive.
The lesson I took away this week is to allow myself to decouple from day-to-day crises. It will always be important to pay attention to what I believe is important, much like what Winifred Gallagher told Cal Newport in Deep Work, but it’s also important to choose my focus with care.
The second rule of Cal Newport’s book this week was to embrace boredom. He mostly revisited ideas he’s discussed earlier in his book, how you need to take breaks from the Internet and not turn to it every time you feel bored and I pretty much completely agree with all of that. A new concept he brought up is mind looping, which is a phenomenon that occurs when your brain is faced with a problem and, in an attempt to avoid excess expenditure of energy, begins to loop over and over again through information you already know. I feel this occurs on social media as well, kind of like a goldfish effect. The same information cycles through my feed again and again because I’m so used to reading and immediately forgetting or pushing it out of my mind. Couple this with information constantly being changed and twisted, and I’m suddenly horrified to think that this is where I’m spending a lot of time and energy.
Social media is a powerful tool that I will always believe can be used for good. Judging from my feed, 70% of the time it is. But to live a focused life is to live the best kind of life there is and after delving deeper into my social media habits, I think it would be productive to take what I’ve learned there and divide my focus between more deserving sources.
Haidt, Jonathan, and Tobias Rose-Stockwell. “The Dark Psychology of Social Networks.” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company,12 Nov. 2019 www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/12/social-media-democracy/600763/.
Newport, C. (2016). Rule#2: Embrace Boredom. In Deep Work (pp. 155 – 180). New York: Grand Central Publishing.
Thompson, Clive. “Social Media Is Keeping Us Stuck in the Moment.” This Magazine, Red Maple Foundation, 4 Dec. 2017, this.org/2017/11/15/social-media-is-keeping-us-stuck-in-the-moment/.
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