I’ve tried to stop using social media to some degree in recent weeks. Predominantly, I’m talking about Twitter, which I spent far more time browsing than is probably healthy. This was prompted chiefly by the new owner imposing a limitation on the number of tweets users could read. My strong suspicion is that the “rate limit” was actually a bug, not a feature and I think I’m right in saying that it has been resolved at this point. I’m not inclined to check. I deleted the app from my phone and only retained use of the site at all for about another week, purely as I was trying to blag a better ticket to a concert I attended. I have been poking around a little bit in recent days as I'm trying to download my account data archive (without success) and have taken the time to reassure those who've asked where I am that I haven't met a terrible fate.
Following the concert, I changed my password to something random that I remembered only long enough to re-enter on the confirmation screen and specifically asked my browser not to save it for me, essentially locking me out of the site. I haven’t deleted my Twitter account altogether, I’m not sure I’m ready to bin it off entirely just yet. Sad as it may seem, I view the account as a bit too valuable to me to do so. I’ve got a nice number of followers, numerous positive relationships with other users and I hold a vaguely desirable handle. This all sounds quite lame, but the quality of my experience on Twitter is down to what I would comfortably predict are thousands of hours spent on the site, trying to be funny, clever or nice. I’ve been on Twitter for 14 years (the first “big” story I remember seeing on there before anywhere else was the death of Michael Jackson in 2009). That’s 5,113 days. I would again comfortably estimate I spent on average at least an hour a day scrolling on the site. If it’s pushing towards two hours (which would have been easily met during the work-from-home-times of the pandemic and honestly probably before and after that as well), then I’m probably meeting the requirements of the “10,000 hours to become an expert” platitude.
Not that my account was anything particularly special. I followed around 800 people, had 2,300-ish followers and had three or four tweets go viral on occasion. I think many active users without private accounts will have a popular tweet or two at some point. I think the value and “expertise” of my account is that I’d curated it in such a way as I (by and large) wasn’t subject to abuse or even bad or annoying content on a regular basis. I’d forged friendships with people that were probably about as strong as any that exist entirely on that network (I’m aware people have got married to folks they met on Twitter, but I assume in these cases there was some amount of face-to-face contact between sliding into the DMs and walking down the aisle). If I asked a question to the gallery, I could be reasonably sure of getting some responses.
I’m aware I’m talking about this in the past tense when I’ve only stopped actively using the site for about three weeks and will in all likelihood go back on there before long, certainly if I have a new creative project to share. I’m also aware that I’ve spoken about my experience on there in very positive terms, which raises the question of why bother to stop using it in the first place.
There’s all the usual reasons people want to give up social media: the ratio to meaningful interactions to wasting time is skewed heavily in the less desirable direction. The noticeable affect on my attention span. The time taken away from more enriching activities. And that’s not to mention the toxicity on there, mostly as I’ve spent a long time creating barriers against it so rarely encounter it. But, and without wishing to make it personal, I refuse to surrender my leisure time to an individual so capricious and so lacking in both humour and self-awareness. If it’s not the 600 tweet limit or whatever, it’ll be something else. Maybe it’s overly stubborn of me, but if some kid says I can only kick his football ten times and then he’s taking it away, I’d rather find something else to play with altogether.
Also, can we talk about the rebrand? This is something I became aware of after the fact, rather than "in real time", which is how I and imagine most twitter-addicts experience news stories, particularly ones about the platform they're actually using, and was therefore novel in and of itself. In my opinion, rebranding as "X" is not only stupid for all the obvious practical reasons, but also unbelievably lacking in imagination to a baffling degree. "X" is like an 8 year old's idea of something edgy and cool. It's like what you'd call the evil corporation in a parody of a 50s sci-fi B movie. "X" is literally a placeholder character for when we don't actually know what to call something. Shouldn't the world's zaniest tech billionaire be able to think of a better name for his app, or at least hire someone else who can? Calling it X says to me "I thought for no longer than 2 minutes about this" or "this will do" or "I genuinely think this is a good name", all of which strike me as unencouraging signs about the creative direction of the company. I'd have called it chazzwazzers.
I’ve looked at other social media platforms. I have a Mastodon account, but there’s barely anyone on there and the overall tone is a bit preachy and there’s a sense of the elders in The Village desperate to preserve the weird little commune they’ve built from the dangerous outsiders with their wicked ways. I have an Instagram, but I think I massively prefer to communicate with words rather than pictures. I previously went on there maybe monthly tops and posted even less. I’ve been looking at it more regularly since being off Twitter and there’s something a bit soulless about the place. I can’t see myself getting addicted to it. I think the adage about Instagrammers sharing their best lives (however aspirational or outright fake) and Twitter users sharing their derangement and depravity is somewhat true and the latter is much more entertaining. I also refuse to learn what a story or a reel is or how to make or read one. I pressed the button to make a Threads account but was then hit with an overwhelming wave of apathy and did nothing more.
Facebook, of course, is a bin fire. I have also been on that more regularly and the site has become borderline unusable. There are about four real life people I know who put stuff on there regularly and, with the best will in the world, they’re not sharing anything especially funny or interesting. And my god, the suggested posts. 90% of the timeline is made up of these and they’re all awful. The algorithm seems to think I must like Lord of the Rings. I could not be any more ambivalent about Lord of the Rings if I tried. I have never read them. I have only seen the first two films when they came out, literally twenty odd years ago and bits of the third one. I thought Facebook was supposed to be way more insidious about our interests than this. If it wasn’t for a practical means to keep in touch with some older family members, I would close that account.
That leaves Reddit, which was the second biggest time-sink after Twitter. I have also locked myself out of my Reddit account, but am still visiting the Tottenham Hotspur page on a very regular basis, which I want to stamp out, but it is a very good source of regular if meaningless Spurs updates, which I crave. Not being logged in prevents me from interacting with other commenters on there, which is frustrating, as at least 50% of the users of that page have terrible opinions and someone really should be there to tell them.
All this angst prompted me to start reading Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now by Jaron Lanier. I don't know that I'm going to delete any of them permanently, but it has provided me with some justification to try and drastically reduce my presence. I hope I can keep it up. It's a pretty depressing read that actually leaves me feeling very pessimistic about the general direction society seems to be heading.
I am going to try blogging more for the 18,000th time. Right now, I'm conflicted between posting a link to this post on Twitter as a (temporary?) sign off, but whilst I don't want to be one of those folks that makes a massive deal about leaving a platform, it would also be nice for more than zero people to read this and offer some thoughts to those who care enough to check. So I guess I probably will. There's a Linktree with all my various online presences on the side there. See you on Goodreads?
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