The other day I went into my digital well-being settings to put a 1-minute timer on Instagram (as one does after they’ve already spent 34 minutes on Instagram). My phone displayed in big words at the top of the screen:
“Taking a break from your phone can make you feel better.”
I lol’d, literally. First, Phone presumes that I feel bad. As if to beat me to the punch, Phone admits that it may be partly to blame for my presumed bad feelings. Phone then helpfully reminds me that I can put it down at any time. You can quit whenever you want! You might even feel better!
No mention of why I picked up the object “Phone” in the first place.
In 2014, I decided I should try to look more like a real writer and use my Twitter account (I wasn’t ready to use my name, but I created a separate account for @MariahEppes, so I might someday reclaim the handle and my online identity). The ensuing 2-year addiction ended abruptly after Trump’s election in 2016. I couldn’t believe how pointless the time investment had been. I’d kept “up to date,” been mind-bendingly angry, absorbed so much anger from others. But the result wasn’t a deeper understanding of… anything. What I got instead was a strange form of anxiety, characterized by righteous anger and a quiet fear that I might be irredeemably ignorant.
Ultimately, my Twitter reading made me think it was impossible for Trump to win. It just couldn’t happen. Not with all these people who get it. Right? Then it did. So really, my fear came true. Twitter made me more ignorant, not less.
But I first came to Twitter to be a writer. The experience was mostly discombobulating. There are so many voices. Filling your brain with the voices of others doesn't leave much room for your voice, especially if you’re working to develop one. (btw: I wish I could think of another word for this, because “voice” has been so plumbed and picked apart by writing instruction that it barely holds meaning.)
Inevitably, it feels like the stuff in your head has already been written, and your version is probably dumb anyway. The real curse of the social media environment, to me, isn’t even the voices themselves, but the falsely authoritative tone they carry. Twitter isn’t just an app. It isn’t just a feed of opinions. It’s a congested medium of ultra-short-form didactic, persuasive prose. Even the popular tone of multilayered ironic sarcasm and/or cynicism and/or self-deprecation is both an argument and a form.
When we talk about social media, we usually say we are “looking at” or “scrolling” it. These terms both suggest a more benign intake than social media really demands, as if you look at social media the way you might look at a tree. We don’t look at social media. We read it. What kinds of things get written in this medium? What are the limits of its messages? It’s easy to forget to ask what the form imposes on readers, even though we can all sense that it’s lacking.
If we conceptualize social media as writing—something that is read—it’s easier to see as a construction. None of the apps are natural or neutral forms. We can rely on the fact that every detail (word count, layout, font, color, the mechanics of liking and sharing) has been chosen with the utmost consideration for the intended goal.
As we all know by now, the intended goal of every social media app is “engagement.” This is another word that, for me, has lost most of its meaning. Something that helped me rediscover the word was thinking about this question: What does it actually look like when someone is “engaging with content”? We all know. It looks like subtle thumb gestures and occasional taps. That’s it. That’s the engagement.
Most importantly, social media-as-writing reminds us that there could be alternative mediums, arguments, and forms. Even on the internet. “Social media” is too often used interchangeably with “internet”; another example of these formats becoming hegemonic.
Subtle thumb gestures and occasional taps. What else could we be doing? It feels important to say that this isn’t about guilt. It’s not a matter of that personal failure “distraction” anymore. It’s sheer sensory overload. I fear there’s no help coming for it, not for a long time at least. Until we have some regulation, we’ll have to be extremely discerning of what we let into our minds, and take very seriously the way our inputs create our worlds.
Maybe that’s why the tone of constant irony/cynicism/joking on social media grates on my ears. Why shouldn’t we be taking this seriously? Who benefits if we don’t take it seriously?
One book recommendation: Rolf Dobelli’s Stop Reading the News. Dobelli stopped reading the news in 2009, and this book lays out his philosophy in an urgent manifesto-style. Spoiler alert: forgoing the news only impacted Dobelli’s daily life once in a whole decade. He had a plane to catch, and showed up at the airport—but hadn’t heard about a volcano erupting in Iceland that morning, cancelling all flights.
(And speaking of jokes, this one’s on me: I can’t remember what email address I used to create @MariahEppes, and I don’t know the password. So now, no one can be @MariahEppes on Twitter. Not even Mariah Eppes.)