I turned 50 years old last April. A half-century on this planet. At the time, I had little thought of any kind of reckoning, or taking stock of my life; instead I hatched a vague ambition to record an album. (I have not recorded an album.)
But reckoning found me, nonetheless. And one of the things I have been taking stock of — like many other people, apparently — has been my relationship with my smartphone and social media.
During the pandemic lockdown, struggling with anxiety, I largely withdrew from social media. And when, as “normal” life resumed and I crept back onto Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, I noticed my posts getting fewer likes than they used to. Whether I was being punished by the algorithm for my absence, or whether (more likely) I was just duller and less engaging than I used to be, it was noticeable — and made social a less fun place to be, or at least to participate in. I started posting less and less.
But I kept the apps on my phone. After all, I reasoned, I am responsible for several union accounts as part of my job, and what if there is a social media crisis when I am not at my computer?
And mostly what I found myself doing was pulling out my phone and mindlessly scrolling through Instagram whenever I was bored — waiting in line at the grocery store, that kind of thing. Or if I was, say, talking or having coffee or a drink with someone and they took out their phone. Like a defensive move: Hey, I have important things to do on my phone, too!
The other night, as I was walking across the 16th Street Bridge from Northside to the Strip District, I noticed a swirling mass of birds in the sky ahead of me. There must have been at least two hundred of them.
For several minutes, I watched, mesmerized, as they circled over the intersection of 16th and Penn. Except “circled” is a gross oversimplification. The path they followed reminded me of the patterns I used to draw as a kid using a Spirograph — a toy where you would insert a pen into a hole in a plastic disc edged with gear teeth, then roll that disc around inside a gear-toothed ring, creating intricate spiraling designs. Except these were in three dimensions.
As they collectively followed their fractaline course, the hundreds of birds danced and twisted around each other like the characters in a sprawling Russian novel, individual birds occasionally swinging out on their own but always returning to the group, each particular flight path as unpredictable as a life story, but all held together by some mysterious tensity.
I wondered what drove this behavior. Were they looking for a place to roost and failing to find one, in search of a long-gone yet remembered forest among the brick and concrete buildings? Did their collective motion create some kind of air vortex that herded insects into their mouths, the way groups of humpback whales trap krill in bubbles released from their blowholes as they circle their tiny prey? Or were they simply flying for the sheer joy of it, because that is what their souls demand?
I thought about pulling out my phone to take a video, but decided instead to simply watch, to let the moment enchant me. Then, as if in answer to some distant call, or perhaps some shared instinct, they suddenly mustered together and swept in unison down Smallman Street towards downtown.
The last week of December, I deleted all the social media apps from my phone, and for the most part, they have stayed off. (I still re-install Instagram every weekend so I can post a story linking to these newsletters, because there are clearly a couple of people who only read them that way, but then delete it again on Monday morning.)
And, I’ll be honest, it has felt a little bit like withdrawal. I still have the urge to open my phone when I am bored, but if I have no new emails, nothing sent specifically to me (or which I have actively signed up for and maybe paid for, like a Substack newsletter), there is no “content” to browse.
I was talking on my iPhone with one of the national officers of the union I work for, and the sound kept going out. I unlocked the phone to see if I could fix the problem and was greeted with some kind of weird fashion ad. I double-clicked the home button to call up the list of active apps so I could find the one was showing me this ad, and swiped up to shut it off.
But then there was another. Like those infected websites from twenty years ago that would proliferate your screen full of pop-up windows faster than you could close them, somehow this advertising campaign was virally adding new apps to my phone faster than I could shut them down, let alone remove them — and using up all of the available memory, making it impossible for me to, well, talk on my phone.
Then I woke up, relieved that this was merely a dream-mediated welling up of unconscious fears, and my actual phone, the tool indispensable for navigating modern life, was fine. Or at least not uncontrollably full of ads.
Ted Gioia, whose newsletter
I finally subscribed to recently after at least a year of enjoying his articles when other people shared them, recently published a “State of the Culture” article about, well, the influence of social media — or more specifically, social-media companies and their endless thirst for profit — on the culture.He takes as his starting point the distinction between “art” and “entertainment”:
Many creative people think these are the only options—both for them and their audience. Either they give the audience what it wants (the entertainer’s job) or else they put demands on the public (that’s where art begins).
But then goes on to detail the profitability crisis in all of the “entertainment” industries: movies, TV, music. And posits that the entertainment economy is being replaced by the “distraction” economy:
The fastest growing sector of the culture economy is distraction. Or call it scrolling or swiping or wasting time or whatever you want. But it’s not art or entertainment, just ceaseless activity.
He elaborates how distraction works on our neurochemistry:
Our brain rewards these brief bursts of distraction. The neurochemical dopamine is released, and this makes us feel good—so we want to repeat the stimulus.
and concludes:
The tech platforms aren’t like the Medici in Florence, or those other rich patrons of the arts. They don’t want to find the next Michelangelo or Mozart. They want to create a world of junkies—because they will be the dealers.
Addiction is the goal.
In the first few summers of my college years, I started hanging out while home with a friend group from my high school with whom I had been casually acquainted, but never really part of. We were too young to drink in bars yet, so would roam the town on Kansas summer nights looking for ways to pass the time (and places to drink any alcohol we were able to illicitly acquire).
On one evening we played kickball in the far corner of a supermarket parking lot, the Dillon’s at 6th and Kasold. I suppose in many ways we were proto-hipsters, and we were probably in some sense enjoying playing this game from our elementary-school days with a certain amount of irony, but in those days before the internet, we weren’t performing that irony for anyone except each other.
I say that I have deleted all social media apps from my phone, but — depending on your definition of “social media” — that is not strictly true. I have retained apps, like Facebook Messenger and Signal, that facilitate sending a private message to one person (or sending private messages within a relatively small group of people). In no small part, this is because I am far more comfortable with writing than with talking — the “phone” app on my iPhone is buried in a group called “Talk,” while the gmail app has pride of place on the bottom row:
And I’m not knocking social media here — I have been, and am, part of several vibrant communities that have come into being, or existed primarily or exclusively, on Facebook. The relationships with other people I developed on Twitter were somewhat superficial, sure, but so are most of my in-person relationships. Especially for a writer who has a lot of social anxiety and can be awkward in person, a medium based on text, on stringing words together, can be a more comfortable way to get to know people.
But, as with anything that is good in small doses, I used to do a little but a little wouldn’t do, so the little got more and more.
My first real romantic relationship, in my senior year of high school, was a long-distance relationship. We had no Facebook Messenger, no WhatsApp and no texting, and phone calls — from corded land-line rotary phone to corded land-line rotary phone — incurred long-distance charges to our parents’ phone bills and so were infrequent (and, on top of that, had to be conducted in semi-public parts of our houses).
So we wrote letters, in ballpoint pen on paper ruled with faint blue lines, a triple line of red marking the left margin reserved for the holes that would have allowed us to collect them in a three-ring binder had we been so inclined. (We were not so inclined. I kept her letters in Trapper Keeper folders; I believe she kept mine in a heavy-duty file envelope.)
I did not save her letters (the breakup was messy and painful, at least for me), but I have vivid memories of some of them, both the words and how they looked on the page. Especially one, which she concluded with a sentence about my soul, followed by a large ellipse, and then, in all capitals, centered and surrounded by white space, on its own line, invoking the final song on Tracy Chapman’s second, recently-released album:
ALL THAT YOU HAVE