Escaping the Endless Scroll Part Three: Deprecating the Attention Generator
The journey so far:
Yours truly had a stroke and one of the unexpected side effects was a shift in their relationship with social media and being online. So here’s the story of the break up.
When people ask me why I moved to a small town in the American Midwest, farther than I’d ever moved before from the I-25 corridor, I tell them I moved here for my health. This amuses me to no end because I adore pretending I’m a Victorian with consumption and a need to write poetry. It’s also true.
Well not the consumption part, but definitely the poetry part.
Living at elevation made my nerve pain significantly worse, often raising it to a 5 or higher on the pain scale as an everyday thing.
For those who don’t live with chronic pain, that’s bad.
Finding somewhere to live where my baseline is around a 2 out of 10 means a significant improvement in my quality of life. I had the fortune to discover this while visiting a dear friend and also found that not only did I like it here, I loved it.
Some folks make a face when I tell them I moved here, or moved from Colorado. There tends to be a moment of "but why" when I tell them that I chose to move to a sleepy small town from the tech-infested big city. But the Colorado department of tourism doesn't tell you that Denver is dying, choking to death by efforts to revitalize itself after the pandemic.
Living in a dying city at the end of the world wasn't my idea of a good time. My post-stroke idea of a good time appears to be gardening and birdwatching. Either that or I'm getting old. Or both. Both is good.
It's hard to enjoy either of those in Denver, so I moved a thousand miles away and started over with a lot of things.
On the journey to move to my new home, I also decided it was time to delete my social media accounts. When we crossed the Colorado border, a state I’d lived in for over two decades, I started to delete my online presence. Because someone else was driving, I waited until the exact state line to press the first delete. I always can have a little drama as a snack.
Of course, I’d spent sixty miles prior to that saying “yes I want to delete my account” “yes I’m sure” “yes I’m very sure” “no it’s not you, it’s me” to the various social media platforms.
They don’t make it easy to leave them.
Every time I've let something go in the past, whether it be burning letters from exes or deleting screenshots of conversations that hurt me, I always expect more of a sense of relief. But other than decluttering my storage, it just feels like a task on a to do list.
Perhaps it’s part of the ritual of moving on, only possible when I don't care any more.
I didn’t really feel anything when I deleted a decade of online tracery. I was over it and had already moved on.
It was equally dramatic because my work at the time had required a phone for 2FA (good) but the way it was installed on one’s phone gave them access to one’s phone (bad). So I bought a burner phone to access the app via a wifi connection (no payment/cell plan required).
Yes, I bought a burner phone, changed my identity, and moved across a border. This is a fun story to tell at parties.
Dramatic gesture done, I looked to the next thing on the horizon. Which in this case was Kansas and then further east to my new home.
I said I didn’t feel anything about deleting my accounts. But I did feel something about not having them. That something wasn't loss: it was relief.
I had spent the past ten years in a glass terrarium that felt like it was increasingly too small. I couldn’t grow as a person there; I couldn’t really grow anything but neurotic. The toxicity of the online world had started to make me second guess my true self with every word.
Now I was free, away from the outside speculation about my beliefs and behavior. I didn’t need to sign on to places that felt stifling, where anyone could tap on the glass to demand my attention. I could hide under a rock and remember to breathe without checking my phone every three minutes. Turns out you can’t breathe FOMO and trying to will suffocate you.
Or at least that’s how I felt.
Social media calcified me into the shape of expected behavior with ever shifting rules that cracked me. I suspect I’m not alone.
The only cues for expected behavior we have come from the aggregate of the algorithm. Which means we can only learn how to fit in by reacting to other people’s anger, not their joy, love or any other positive emotion. Positive emotions don’t get nearly as many likes or whatever. Going online trains us to be in a constant state of high alert lest someone deviate from the accepted, poorly defined, near-religious norms. It also teaches us to fear the moment when that someone is us.
In other words, going online is like having a dream where you forgot your pants. The dream is the kind where pant-less, you have to give a presentation on something you have no idea about in front of a room of incredibly hot, successful people. We tend to call those nightmares.
I’ve heard folks say that we attack others to protect ourselves from being attacked; that we use the sins of others as a diversion from our own. I don’t feel like it’s as simple as this (although nothing in life is simple so there’s that). I wouldn’t discount this as an element of our online interactions but there is more to it.
For one, I feel like another component of our online adversarial relationship with each other is:
a) it feels good to feel right about something, to feel like you are winning at internet, to have that feeling of triumph in the core of your chest
b) on some level we believe that it should be that simple to agree with our beliefs (and why can’t they get that? Maybe if I say it with CAPSLOCK so they can hear better, they’ll understand)
c) lacking an agreed-upon social contract (like “we don’t get in fist fights in the grocery store”), we are constantly struggling to navigate how to effectively communicate
d) written communication and spoken communication are wildly different and the internet has removed the translation layer between the two
TLDR: we are really bad at communicating effectively online. Like really, really bad. Exceptionally bad. Bad in a civilization-ending way.
Am I being hyperbolic? Maybe.
Maybe not.
I have a pet theory that it all comes down to psychological safety, which is markedly lacking in public online spaces. When we feel psychologically safe (and feel like we belong), we listen more carefully and with more patience. We are less defensive. We give people more grace.
Grace is not rage. Grace is hard. Rage is easy. And rage is the fuel that keeps the clicks coming. Rage keeps the world burning.
There is no incentive for those who own these online spaces to figure out how to add this safety. They can barely (read: don’t) add anything to help with psysical safety. They even noodle out of doing the right thing to protect kids. It might sound like I think social media companies are evil and you would be right.
The moral of this story is that social media is not safe. We have forgotten that we shouldn’t trust strangers on the internet and to a degree we are the stranger danger. Our ability to lovingly communicate with each other has broken down into bits and bites and been flushed down the tubes.
We don't (and can’t) trust each other to assume positive intent. We don’t feel safe enough to try. Instead we just scream into the swamp of sorrows for help, over and over again. The chorus of our desperation is data-mined and sold to the highest bidder.
We yearn to be seen and heard by others. But social media isn’t the place for that, and it never has been. We conflate attention with connection. Reposting nonsense screencapped from another app with “mood” as our only caption is a great way to get attention, to get those clicky clicky likes. It’s easy, streamlined like a Ford assembly line. Actual connection is hard and messy. Of course we naturally prefer the easy way that feels good.
But it didn’t feel good anymore. When I decided to move across the country, I also decided to move on from social media. It really wasn’t them, it was me. I was becoming someone new and strange, and perhaps, just a little bit, I could try to make genuine connections in this new world.
So step one was to delete my accounts in the most dramatic way possible. Preferably a way that didn’t involve throwing my phone out the window into the vast tedium of the Kansas fields. Step two was to figure out what was next.
I had no idea what was next. But I was sure as heck going to find out.
Continued in Part Four: Be a Potato
