A Farewell to Social Media
Saying Farewell
Today, I bid farewell to three social media platforms I have been using: largely Facebook, and to a lesser extent Instagram and Twitter. While I am not committing to it being a permanent farewell, it is at the very least an indefinite one that will be fairly long term. If you are reading this through my post on one of these platforms, you are reading my last post there, and there is no point using social media to like it or comment on it as I will not be seeing the response.
If you want to stay in touch with me, you will have to figure out some other way to do so (I will also cease using Facebook Messenger). And if you want to stay in touch with what I am thinking, then you will need to sign up at one or both of my two blogs: one on architecture and urbanism, and the other on politics, philosophy and culture.
This essay, my last post on these three platforms, is to announce my departure and to share some thoughts on what led to this decision. You may think it is to do with the much talked about concern over putting personal data in a corporate giant’s hands. This is a serious problem no doubt, and a lot has been said and written about it, so I will not dwell on it here. While the privacy challenge is not an issue I wish to ignore, the tipping point in this decision is elsewhere: an awareness of what is happening within me as a result of my own actions rather than what someone is trying to do to me from without.
Restlessness
I discovered I was in the grip of an unrecognised addiction. I had always thought my smartphone was a tool whose usage I controlled. Then I discovered myself compulsively reaching for my phone as soon as I had a few seconds to spare. Sometimes the few moments available would not be sufficient to read a Twitter thread or a Facebook newsfeed item, but I would still reach for that phone, at the very least for the dopamine rush of seeing a few ‘likes’ received, but often the anxiety of seeing that there were none.
I started becoming less and less thoughtful, for my relationship with the world was becoming more and more transactional. I would pay attention to the world when I had to: when someone engaged me in conversation, or when I was working. But as soon as I had a moment of solitude, I would reach for the phone, detach from the world and lose myself in the disembodied universe of a screen.
I started losing the ability to just be myself: a non-judgmental, unstimulated person. Almost every free moment, I needed the stimulation of my phone. I started losing the ability to concentrate for long periods of time. Social media does not encourage slow thoughtfulness, it tempts you to click on the next link even if you have not finished the previous one, it throws so much loaded material at you that you are driven to skim, always anxious to know what the next post is, scared you will lose out on something important. Gradually, this started to erode on my ability to concentrate on serious reading: something that a large part of my thinking life has always depended on.
Then I came to realise that the compulsion to reach for the phone was so strong, I would sometimes be tempted to do so even when I was in the company of friends and people close to me. While I did give in to this occasionally, fortunately it did not get out of control
Through thinkers like Tristan Harris, Yuval Noah Hariri, and Zeynep Tufekci, I came to know that this addiction problem was neither a bug in the system nor a unique failing on my part. It was a central and carefully designed feature of the system, calibrated with great care by media designers to keep us hooked for longer periods of time so that we may be fodder for advertisers: human beings are now hackable animals.
I first thought if technology was the problem, technology could also offer solutions. I installed an app called Freedom through which I could set time controls that restricted my access to social media. This did not do enough, especially once I discovered that I could bypass the apps controls by using a VPN (something I need for security reasons, given I travel a lot and need to access internet through insecure hotel Wi-Fi networks). I installed another app called Moment which issues warnings when you exceed pre-set limits on the number of pick-ups and total minutes for the day. Over time, one develops immunity to these warnings, and you learn to ignore them.
Clearly, a more extreme withdrawal was called for, given what else was at stake.
The Hyperlink Versus the Stream
In July 2015, Iranian blogger Hossein Derakshan published a moving essay titled ‘The Web We Have to Save’, lamenting that the rich, free, diverse web that he loved (and spent years in an Iranian jail for) is dying, and nobody seems interested in saving it. A few months earlier, Derakshan had been freed from an Iranian prison, where he had originally been sentenced to a 19.5-year term for his blogging activities but was inexplicably pardoned and released after six years. While six years is a fairly long period of time, in the digital world it is an aeon, and he found that the internet was a completely different animal from the one that existed when he went into jail.
The early web depended on hyperlinks that decentralised an earlier information architecture of hierarchies, central hubs and spatial constraints to move toward a rich, variegated and global landscape of networks and nodes. Blogs and discussion group were digital cafes where diverse opinions were exchanged on a wide range of topics: learning you would have had no easy access to earlier. The richness of the network meant that every few clicks took you into a new universe of opinion or information. And in the way you moved and clicked your mouse you could survey and decide on the path by which you navigated the possibilities the web offered.
Today, our digital experience is dominated by the ‘stream’: rather than a browser that helps us navigate a heterogeneous territory of multiple sites, we stay within the stream of information generated by a single social media app. The stream is designed to keep you within its banks, and it does so by either eliminating hyperlinks (like Instagram), or by downgrading them (like Facebook). A hyperlink in a Facebook post has the same status as other objects (such as a photograph or piece of text), and each post cannot carry more than a single hyperlink. The flow of the stream is not the product of personal choice but is shaped by an algorithm that one is not even aware of, designed to hold your attention by feeding you largely what you have liked, so that gradually one remains within the comfort zone of a filter bubble of similarity shaped to maximise your exposure to advertisers. The speed of the stream’s current generates an anxiety to follow as much of it as possible, so when links take you outside, the tendency is to skim them and return, rather than read them carefully and thoughtfully. The value of being in the stream is an impulsive one-click system of ‘likes’, rather than the rigorous stimulation of a discursive exploration.
Looking at the future of my digital life, I would like to prioritise time in a world made of hyperlinks rather than streams.
Distance and Reflection
Till the fairly recent past, getting the space to think seriously came quite easily as a way of life. All you needed was the understanding of those close to you to leave you alone for some time. Solitude immediately granted you the distance so that you could divert the direction of your gaze from outwards to inwards and just think.
This is no longer so straightforward. One can be alone yet connected to everywhere. And once connected to everywhere, one can be in company and yet be alone. The reflective distance of solitude is still possible, but it does not come as easily now, and requires a careful and deliberative effort, and the addictiveness of screens can block you from recognising this loss of reflective solitude. In ‘The Ecstasy of Communication’, Jean Baudrillard points out that the nature of alienation has changed: at one time it was characterised by distance and isolation from the reassurance of the world, but now it is characterised by an overwhelming proximity to everything. Deprived of the distance of contemplation, we are reduced to pure screen, pure mirror, a switching centre for masked networks of influence we cannot see.
I now seek to reclaim that lost space of solitude in which I can renew my sense of being.
Slowness
In ‘Slowness’ (a novel that is also a work of philosophy), Milan Kundera proposes a strong correlation between slowness and memory. He asks us to imagine the everyday situation of a man walking along a street. He seeks to remember something of which the memory escapes him: his walk automatically slows down. Imagine the converse, he remembers something disagreeable which he desires to forget: his walk automatically speeds up. Kundera uses this thought experiment to propose two laws of existential mathematics: the degree of slowness is proportional to the degree of remembering, and the degree of speed is proportional to the degree of forgetting. Later in the text, he revisits these laws and reverses them, suggesting that our society’s surrender to an obsession for speed allows us to avoid confronting the loss of our ability for memory.
The compulsiveness of social media is a primary means today of surrendering to this obsession for speed. When I write for my blogs, I think and write with slowness and deliberation, and a chronological memory of those thoughts is archived on my computer. I revisit those memories periodically; the rhythm of those visitations is as meaningful as the accent of any one specific re-reading, and this is a significant source of renewal. In contrast, a post on Facebook or Twitter, disappears in the flow of the stream, and even if I have sought to transcend minutiae of routine life and share thoughts of significance, a few weeks later the flow of consciousness that led to a specific set of posts is lost to my memory. Finding old posts is not easy on social media. While it is possible, you have to have a specific search phrase or time period, and spontaneous open-ended revisits to memories in the hope of a fortuitous encounter with yourself is not a feasible proposition.
Slowness is far more than the foundation for memory. It opens up space for serendipity to play its role and is necessary to perceive the fine grain of life, the subtleties that may seem trivial but actually constitute the bedrock of joy. It is only on a slow walk that one pauses to enjoy the fragrance of flowers that lie alongside the path we are traversing.
A Restless Farewell
From all the concerns I have written about here, it may appear that my time on social media has been largely unhappy. This is far from the case: It has allowed me to stay in touch with people I may not have interacted with otherwise, I have learned a lot from these interactions, and have looked forward to and enjoyed the time spent on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. If I say goodbye now, it is despite the fact that I have spontaneously felt the time spent there to be worthwhile. Every choice involves trade-offs on how time could have been spent otherwise, and I am only recently becoming aware of the trade-offs involved here. I hope that the time I gain will be much better spent and will drive me toward interactions with others that are more substantive than those to be had on social media.
It has not been an easy decision at all and is intertwined with a strong sense of something lost. I guess you can call it a ‘restless farewell’, and all I can do at this point is cite these verses from Bob Dylan’s song of that name:
Oh all the money that in my whole life I did spend
Be it mine right or wrongfully
I let it slip gladly past the hands of my friends
To tie up the time most forcefully
But the bottles are done
We’ve killed each one
And the table’s full and overflowed
And the corner sign
Says it’s closing time
So I’ll bid farewell and be down the road
Oh ev’ry foe that ever I faced
The cause was there before we came
And ev’ry cause that ever I fought
I fought it full without regret or shame
But the dark does die
As the curtain is drawn and somebody’s eyes
Must meet the dawn
And if I see the day
I’d only have to stay
So I’ll bid farewell in the night and be gone
Oh, ev’ry thought that’s strung a knot in my mind
I might go insane if it couldn’t be sprung
But it’s not to stand naked under unknowin’ eyes
It’s for myself and my friends my stories are sung
But the time ain’t tall, yet on time you depend
And no word is possessed by no special friend
And though the line is cut
It ain’t quite the end
I’ll just bid farewell till we meet again
Oh a false clock tries to tick out my time
To disgrace, distract, and bother me
And the dirt of gossip blows into my face
And the dust of rumors covers me
But if the arrow is straight
And the point is slick
It can pierce through dust no matter how thick
So I’ll make my stand
And remain as I am
And bid farewell and not give a damn
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Postscript added in early May 2020:
In the midst of the lockdown during the Covid-19 pandemic, I have returned to Facebook and Twitter, but in a very limited way. On Twitter I follow announcements only of local government and police to understand the situation. And on Facebook, I use an app to limit the times at which I can access it, so my interaction on the platform is very limited, using it primarily as a medium to exchange thoughts that help me come to terms with this radically changed world.
