On Social Technology
Our current cultural landscape for how we approach social technology is broken. Over the past decade or so, there have been a growing number of voices complaining about just how terrible social media has been getting lately. Some of the more notable issues caused by social media might include body dysmorphia, political extremism, general toxicity and hatred, and just the fact that it can be a vice you turn to during depression, which just exacerbates your issue further.
I've heard certain voices advocate that the way out of this disaster is to reject corporate social media platforms altogether, migrating instead to de-centralized, Federated platforms, where anyone can start a server to host a portion of the platform. In setting up this server, they create their own little sub-group of the whole, able to create their own content moderation and other related rules. This way, as advocates argue, the user can retain a kind of freedom to choose what server, and thus what type of rules they want to buy into, while still being able to interact with the larger community of the whole. There's more to Federated platforms than this, but that gets the general idea across.
To me, the Federation model fails because it only addresses the short-sighted 'corporate ownership' complaint. I think we need to be looking at our relationship with digital technology even more fundamentally than this.
Evaluating different activities
I think it would be good to perhaps start by defining a method for ranking the value or worth of different activities. Suppose we go to a person (any person), and asked them how much they personally might value doing a certain activity. We could even ask about many different activities, and go about ranking them in terms of more or less value.
We won't be defining any kind of actual amounts, all I want is for you to recognize the kind of relative scale that you might have for your own personal self. Also note that this ranking should not be dependent on how much time the activity takes, only basing it on how valuable it would be to have finished the activity. We account time in when deciding whether a given activity is actually worth the effort.
Okay, so we have our values for different activities in our head, and we know that different activities might take more or less time to complete. What we should then be looking for is activities that are quick and high value. Beyond that, we also will see high value but lengthy activities as a good investment, and quick but low value activities as sometimes worth the minimal effort. What we should be avoiding are activities that are lengthy in time but are still just low value -- these things don't reward us for our efforts.
I would argue that the mindless scrolling of social media platforms -- that is, scrolling through posts made by complete strangers on your FYP -- likely ranks somewhere between moderate value to low value for most people. And only slightly higher for posts created by actual friends.
Social media, be it corporate or federated, is designed to keep you engaged with their moderate to low value content for as long as possible. They want to keep you hooked on slop. Not only that, but it works! It is incredibly common -- at least among my own age group in our early 20s -- for many people to be spending very large amounts of time just scrolling through random posts on their FYP. They're willingly spending lengthy amounts of time doing something that is to their own account not a valuable activity.
I'm not here to say that you should never engage in low value activities, we all do things to relax or waste time occasionally. But the fact that social media already has many other negative effects on its user, I think its time that our culture takes a more critical look at this technology, and questions the way that we use it.
I think we all need to adapt our interaction model with technology to cater to what we actually want out of it -- not just following blind consumption habits. Me personally, I've deleted all social media off my phone. I check Instagram texts a few times a week through my browser (bookmarked to the DMs page, so I don't get distracted by mindless scrolling on the feed). I've begun using my phone number to text most people, and its helped to remove distractions from my life.
To me, the most crucial part of social technology is not creating an avenue for socialization while online. Instead, social technology should first and foremost be understood as an easier way to plan and coordinate in person (that is to say, real) social interactions. As a secondary function, I would say that being social while online is not a bad thing. Especially for those who live long distances away and want to stay in touch, it can be extremely useful. But I think a large reason for the dissatisfaction with modern social media is the fact that we're putting far too much stock in it as a medium for interaction. Online socialization is incomplete, and should be kept to as much of a minimum as possible, substituting that time with actual interaction with other humans in the real world.
Acknowledgements:
This blog post was heavily inspired by Cal Newport's book "Digital Minimalism". You can check out my review of the book as well as a few links to download the ebook for free over on my website.
Also, if you wanted a more detailed discussion about time and value, you might enjoy looking into Thoreau's concept of "New Economy". He laid it out in his book "Walden" during the mid 1800s. He was much more radical than I am, but it's an interesting point of view nonetheless.