Let’s say you’re actually using social media with purpose,
for instance:
-to stay in touch with people in your life
-to stay in touch with people that interest you
-to stay informed
this is probably not so bad, right?
Better than mindlessly stimulating yourself with vacuous nonsense and filth
But it’s still bad,
One reason I already covered extensively: the information economy
The extraordinarily, unnaturally palpable incentive is to get more views, more likes, more clout,
That incentive is pumped beyond any reason
EASILY dwarfs the original incentives, such as:
-sharing
-creating
-learning
I’m not saying it always ruins them entirely.
But often it does,
And it’s almost always present there, as a threat,
The threat of an incentive that destroys your original incentives and integrity
Thus
whatever you read there, is already likely polluted
The second reason is the form
There’s ABSOLUTELY nothing natural about the form
It’s WAY too fast
It’s WAY too curated
It’s WAY too impersonal
Even if the creator, the speaker, was the paragon of integrity
This is JUST NOT a normal way of INTERACTING with the other person,
Them SHARING their thoughts in a tweet,
Or uploading a fucking photo into the infinite void,
The closest it comes to something from real world is someone speaking publicly,
In which case it’s similarly one-sided,
Except such event carries incomparably more weight,
Vs the ever-changing torrent of seconds-long attention from an ocean of unknown unknowns — espying the brilliant aphorism you came up with today, only to swipe you away again,
Or seeing your new fucking hairstyle,
Or you puffed up running your mouth on a short video, shorter than it takes to say hi to your neighbour
There’s nothing normal about it
I think it causes:
-Faces, characters, personalities burnout
-Opinions burnout
-Stimulation-without-action burnout, like you’re paralysed on a wheelchair and sent flying through Tokyo
-Meaning burnout, meaningless burnout
-Attention burnout
-I mean, EVERYTHING burnout
I contend that this does not exactly happen the same way in real life
Like I said — the closest analogy would be a public speech. In which case you’re still among real people, whose faces you can see, and whom you can immediately MEASURE, interact with, SEE why the fuck they’re there and what they’re actually made of
And then the rest of the life is OF COURSE mostly interacting 1-1,
At worst it’s a boring party where 2 people rant and other 4 listen
Still far more human and natural than ANYTHING online
But usually it’s a 1-1 interaction
Orders of magnitudes greater commitment to communication
Incomparably more organised and grounded, even if you started by debating politics, followed up with travel stories, then got into an physical altercation over the business deal, and then had sex
And what about other media?
TV? Radio? Books
Again — closer to public speech, which is a natural form, a phenomenon that occurs naturally in real life,
And those virtual versions of it — are still closer to the original — than social media are to anything “social”
But even with all that said — we all know what TV did to very many people
“Don’t trust everything they say on the TV”, they would say, then go watch more tv,
It was bad before, but got 10 times worse
Finally, what to do with all that?
Nothing, actually,
You find your own way of engaging with the world, that:
-doesn’t destroy your focus
-warp your perception of the world
-overstimulate you and NUMB you
-annoys you with it’s shallowness and sensationalism
-trigger your suspicion, smell fishy
-just plain fails to ACTUALLY contribute to your goals
-and takes attention away from love, nature, and creating something wonderful
I think from the above frame — we will naturally become sick of scrolling
doesn’t matter if you’re scrolling dancing whores on tik tok, cat vids, or wise words of your favourite philosophers and gurus,
we’ll just lose taste for this form of informational consumption,
I know that I did
OBVIOUSLY I still need information
And I get it
I go STRAIGHT to where I can find it — and obtain it,
Then I sit with it in silence and digest it like one should