A few months ago, I began growing unhappy with the extent of my mobile social media use.
Yes, I know.
This is quite the fashionable thing to do nowadays. Many friends take temporary “fasts” from social media. But my motivations, intentions, and decisions are different from most:
I don’t want to delete social media from my life: I derive quite a bit value from it.
I simply wanted to find the way to beat The Algorithm, get more of what I wanted from my social media time, and use the newly found time to do other things instead of endlessly scrolling through irrelevant feeds.
I am not an anti-social media crusader.
If anything, I had always been an early adopter: my twitter handle predating the New York Times’ official account, my foursquare account number in the low triple digits. Friendster, myspace, blogger, tumblr, flickr… I’ve tried them all. A chronic oversharer who works out her feelings by writing and catalogs her life by taking photos of small details no one else notices, social media had always been a welcome diversion in my life and a way to stay connected to dear friends who often live across an ocean.
But in late 2018, I began to feel like the only thing I was seeing in my feed were posts from commercial accounts, and very little content from real people I knew in real life.
So I went on a facebook “prune” I hoped would improve the quality of content in my feed. I unfollowed and unliked every account that wasn’t a close real life friend.
For a few days, it worked: I was seeing posts from friends, family, and colleagues. I caught up with so many who had been getting buried in the flood of commercial content from sponsored accounts.
But then The Algorithm got wise.
Advertising replaced the commercial content I had diligently removed. I tried clearing my advertising preferences. But with facebook essentially acting as SSO for many of the online shopping sites I was using, they got populated again in no time.
Worse, I noticed that facebook started inflating my notifications. Instead of just highlighting when someone reacted or commented on a post of mine, facebook thought it was important that I knew things I didn’t really care about. “So and so responded to events in your area.” Not “events similar to those you’ve gone to in the past,” or “events you’ve attended together,” but just random events in a randomly determined geographical proximity. “What were you up to on this day 10 years ago? Don’t you want to know?” No, facebook, I was probably hanging out with one of my exes and I don’t need yet another reminder that they are no longer in my life.
So I withdrew from facebook: I deleted the app from my phone, and only logged in from my desktop browser, to respond to “real” notifications and ignore the rest. It wasn’t much of a loss: no one seemed to be using facebook much anymore anyway.
Instagram and twitter were another matter. Every morning began with a bleary eyed 30-minute scroll through those feeds: frustratingly unchronological, overwhelmed with advertising which led to me if not buying, then definitely coveting, many many objects I didn’t really need.
But Instagram and twitter were harder to nix than facebook: both acted as a creative outlet, in addition to being a source of information. Sure, I had occasionally deleted those apps (usually after a breakup to avoid seeing an ex living their life as if they didn’t just destroy mine). But I was unwilling to give up sharing my photography and snarky quips with the world permanently.
So every morning, I woke up, scrolled in bed, scrolled on my commute, scrolled in the bathroom at work, scrolled during lunch, and checked again many many times throughout the day….
And then I hit Level 400 on Candy Crush. This was a wakeup call that I developed an unhealthy relationship with my phone. I was spending too much time staring at its tiny screen instead of doing things I told myself I didn’t have time for: reading real books, writing for pleasure, knitting… You know, having hobbies!
Just then, a friend mentioned a podcast episode I should listen to. Some guy came on Ezra Klein’s podcast to talk about minimizing your relationship with your smart phone.
Turns out that guy was Cal Newport, a computer science professor at Georgetown. He had just written a book called “Digital Minimalism” to help people declutter their digital lives in the same way that Marie Kondo was decluttering their closets.
I was intrigued. I decided that I would read the book, try Cal’s advice, and see what I thought.
But once I dug into Cal’s book, I realized that the solution I needed would be much more nuanced than the approach Cal advocated for.
So I’m going to write a blog series telling you about my reaction to the book, what I did, and how it’s working out.
Stay tuned for the next installment, a week from today.
