Fri 17 February 2023Or: Why I quit social media
In this iteration of my blog I did not include functionality like 'Share on Twitter' and so on. Why you ask? I personally quit so-called social media in 2014, and here is what effects it had on me, and why I advise anyone to do the same.
Besides the obvious stuff like "regular turmoil caused by Twitter posts from alleged world leaders", or "we have no clue yet how Facebook/Twitter alters the brains of the people who use them and how it impacts society", I experienced first hand the negative consequences of building my own filter bubbles, and I hardly noticed how time-consuming my engagement with social media had become, while giving me almost nothing in return.
But first things first. As I had access to the internet from an early age (I believe starting in 1994/95 via dial-up modem), I went trough almost all iterations of 'social media' there is: mailing lists, early web forums, a couple of predecessors of social networks or online-communities no one outside of Germany is aware of, like Diginights (a photo sharing platform) or kwick! (an early social netowrk somewhat local to south-west Germany), then much later Myspace and then StudiVZ (another one from Germany), I sporadically used stumbleupon, tumblr, and Instagram for a short time, then Facebook and Twitter. I joined Facebook in 2007, and Twitter a few months after that.
At first I perceived those things like anyone else I guess, like a fun way to blast out news about oneself, or to keep in touch with people I hadn't met for a while, or to get access to news faster. I witnessed all the anecdotes like "thanks to Facebook I was reunited with my lost xyz", or the spread of urban legends that where roaming around since much earlier, but now re-incarnated as Facebook posts. But after the arab spring during 2010/11 I was completely sold, believing the downsides of these platforms are outweighed by those seemingly 'positive' impacts they can have. I remember that I found Twitter equally superior to traditional news outlets, simply because it allowed for information to spread faster, and for more grassroots journalism.
I then used Twitter quite heavily, not by tweeting myself or interacting, but by following all sorts of news or persons I found interesting, and most of the stuff was about "digital civil rights" or general news outlets. I remember letting tweets pile up in TweetDeck for about 30 minutes, and then work trough lanes of categorized tweets, and for each 30 minutes of collected tweets there was an increasing amount of news I had to check: links to news sites, blog posts, or other Twitter accounts. I remember I regularly had to slim down the list of accounts I followed, just to be able to stay within the self-inflicted time range of 30 minutes, otherwise I would never catch up. This was only during daytime of course, so each morning I had to go trough all the stuff that I missed over the night, and this alone ate up 1-2 hours every morning.
My use of Facebook was quite different, I wasn't using it as a source for general news that much, more as a tool to keep me informed about what my friends were doing. I never did things like "just add anyone I meet to have a high friend count", and I honestly can't remember the number, I think it was always below 100? My Facebook feed then consisted of maybe three or four kinda "loud" friends who were posting several times a day. Then for some reason I started following companies, like record labels, and I don't even remember why, maybe I felt that I was getting news about new music releases more 'directly'? I have no idea. I wasn't using Facebook Groups either, since to me they were like a worse form of internet forums.
This all happened while I was in college. I remember constantly fighting those distractions, TweetDeck on my laptop and Facbook on my phone were open all the time. I guess as a student I wasn't that aware of how time-consuming this actually was, since communicating with my study colleagues or reading about IT related news was somehow embedded into the useage of those platforms. I then (despite those distractions) graduated college and my use of social media continued until 2014.
Then on one day I started to do some introspection, like "how long am I actually looking at those feeds", and the results were not good. I realized an significant amount of my waking hours was allocated to all of this, and all of a sudden I realized what I was reading exactly. On Facebook the persons who posted most of the content presented to me were some distant friends I hadn't met for decades. Additionally, the things they were posting were, how shall I say, more interesting to a psychologist than me. And the rest was advertising from companies or brands I was following. I realized I was looking at ads deliberately, and at the same time I had quit TV since I was 15 and was using ad-blockers anywhere else. That felt not right.. why am I doing this? You might say "just mute those friends and quit those ads", but then there was pratically no reason left to use Facebook altogether. Actually newsworthy information about close friends was extremely rare, and if there were news I ultimatively had to know in the same minute they would just call or message me.
Quitting Twitter was even more difficult to me. I used it for years, and I couldn't imagine consuming news in any other way then "directly" from my various news sources or people I followed. I had my daily routine of catching up in the morning, maybe 45 minutes on Facebook and Twitter each, followed by those segments of catching up every half hour. But I also noticed that all I was consuming were "bad news". I realized virtually all the information I read was catastrophic or alarming in nature, about some government doing evil stuff, "concerning developments" in the digital civil rights space and so on. I recall that one day I didn't want to read it anymore, it was too draining mentally, and just like on Facebook I honestly could not say why exactly I was looking at this. Most of the information wasn't even related to regulations in Germany, so there was no way how any of this had any direct impact on my life at all.
I asked myself: What direct impact does any of the ingested information have on my life in general, other than feeling worse than before? I realized that there is hardly any information that is that urgent I had to know about it immediately. If it were that urgent, I would notice it anyways. Those platforms gave me the impression that I was getting relevant stuff faster, I was closer to the source etc. but the direct effect was nothing but stress, I was deliberately consuming ads or stuff that stressed me out. I had to stop.
I then gradually quit social media. I first left Facebook, and just as expected the impact on my day-to-day life was zero, and all of a sudden I had 45 minutes of free time every morning. I started un-following personal accounts on Twitter, and shortly after that I converted all my followings of news outlets into RSS subscriptions, and I didn't even use an RSS reader on my mobile phone at first. I think I knew RSS for a long time, since it was embmedded into Netscape Navigator, and I knew it was there all along. So all of my news intake boiled down to "skim over RSS headlines twice a day". Since then I'm kind of 'regulating' my news consumption, all I do nowadays is fetch RSS items once per hour, I even code up my own RSS readers, this gives me additional control over the presentation of news items.
The effects were nothing but positive. The relief from "constant intake of bad news" was overwhelming, and all of a sudden I gained several hours of more free time a day. Other positive effects of restriction to news exposure at most once per hour are that the stress from "always having to know what happens right NOW" completely disappears, and the stressing nature of "breaking news" just goes away. It also helps feeling more emotionally detached from events in general, just by knowing 'all news I read is not about immediate events, there is nothing I can do about it', even if it is just one hour later. In all those years there was never any public news event that I had to be informed of right away, not a single one. In case of emergencies involving people close to me they will of course call me, plus all my friends can reach me by phone or messengers.
Of course this was all before any recent 'fake news' and 'echo chamber' discussions, and social media somehow got even worse. This is a clear sign to me that somehow regulating social media consumption and general news intake is the way to go, and research on how often you should consume social media is still in its infancy, just google for 'social media intake'. From my personal experience I can advise anyone to just use good ol' RSS, and as a bonus you can skip any ads, depending on the feed source.