Category: social-media

I’ve become increasingly convinced that social media – in its corporate, algorithmic form – is harmful. Not just politically, as we’re seeing from gamergate going global; but in the way it removes energy from the offline world.

Last year I gave a couple of talks where I referred to Hakim Bey’s book Immediatism. Bey talks about the need for unmediated artistic interactions, but stresses the importance of these being in person:

To be “too busy” for the Immediatist project is to miss the very essence of Immediatism. To struggle to come together every Monday night (or whatever), in the teeth of the gale of busyness, or family, or invitations to stupid parties—that struggle is already Immediatism itself. Succeed in actually physically meeting face-to-face with a group which is not your spouse-&-kids, or the “guys from my job,” or your 12-step Program—& you have already achieved virtually everything Immediatism yearns for. An actual project will arise almost spontaneously out of this successful slap-in-the-face of the social norm of alienated boredom.

There is something alienating and banal about corporate social media. It feels like Guy De Bord’s vision of the spectacle taken to the extreme: “The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.”

More than anything I wonder about how this corporate social media is draining the energy that should be used for in-person encounters. I’m not thinking of tedious nostalgia, like saying people don’t talk to strangers because of their phones. I’m thinking of things like conversations about shared interests happening online and never reaching the real world.

In the last episode of Panic World podcast, Magdalene Taylor described seeing a group of women in a bar browsing Tinder while, nearby, a group of men were doing the same thing. That’s an example of what I’m thinking about – real-life conversations that are short-circuited by the internet.

This month, I deleted my Instagram and deactivated my Bluesky account. It was hard – how will I keep up with the world? How will I promote my own work? The opportunity cost of leaving feels massive. But, at the same time, I definitely won’t find what I am looking for online. I want a way out of that alienated boredom.

The Internet has been valuable for putting groups in touch with each other – it’s allowed geographically scattered marginalised communities to make contact and organise. But I think there is something unhealthy about the current form. I am disengaging to look for something better.

PS – you can still find me on mastodon and letterboxd.

The main argument of Cal Newport’s book Deep Work was that significant work only comes through undisturbed and focussed effort, as opposed to the shallow work achieved when constantly interrupted by alerts. Newport saw shallow work as easily replicated and of little value. It’s a seductive and well-argued theory. His book gives many compelling examples for different types of deep work.

But lately I’ve been wondering if there’s a problem in that the old ways of working cannot easily be compared against something new and different. What if there are types of shallow work that are as powerful as deep work? And there would then also be people who function better at shallow work than others.

Deep work is much rarer these days than before the Internet – given the expectation for me to be reachable on teams and slack all day, there is less opportunity to focus on detailed tasks. In my recent project, some of my work on unfamiliar software has led me to working weekends, just to have uninterrupted time.

But I can see advantages to shallow work. With everyone being networked, knowledge is much more accessible. Information is not confined to books but can be accessed within seconds. I listened to a podcast where a film theorist explained that young people nowadays are discussing more sophisticated subjects than she was at their age. You can learn the basics of a new skill, or how to fix something, with a quick search.

When I started programming, the full APIs of the tools we used we on a shelf of books in the office. You were expected to remember as much of this as possible, and we were definitely judged on how often we crossed the room to look things up. Now, the APIs are all accessible in IDEs, and any problems can be quickly searched in StackOverflow. I used to read books on programming tools. Now I read a Quickstart guide and copy a few examples of what I need into that.

I love reading books. There’s a value to getting the texture of a subject, something you can’t get from a quick info-snack. Books also benefit from perspective – I’ve learned more about politics from accounts written a few years later than from the news.

But too many books are padded out to make sure they hit the right length to be sellable. I retain very little from the tens of thousands of words I read in a non-fiction text. And maybe not being tied to books as a learning technique will enable young people to learn faster. It’s exciting that there are so many ways to learn, and that ideas are being unbundled from books.

Like all things, it’s probably about balance, but I do worry that there is something missing from this debate, that there are advantages to the shallow work approach. I try to keep my alerts to a minimum, but it’s possible that managing a complicated media environment is just an essential modern skill and that something fundamental has changed.

I had an email this morning, telling me that my Instagram account had been blocked:

Your account has been suspended. This is because your account, or activity on it, does not follow our Community Guidelines.

As far as I can make out from the links provided, my recent posting behaviour hit some sort of filter that identified me as a bot. I was sent a numeric code and told to submit a selfie of that number written on a piece of paper. This selfie had to include my hands, presumably to prove that the image was not AI-generated.

Having my Instagram account deleted is sad, but it’s not a huge loss. I did not lose the only copy of any photos (there was no option to download my data), but there were message threads with a couple of people I don’t have other ways of contacting. The process is bureaucratic and Kafkaesque, and I can imagine it being unpleasant and alienating for people who rely on their instagram (particularly for those who run businesses using it).

I guess this sort of thing is going to happen more often in future, particularly as more customer service is automated. I dread trying to persuade my phone company, bank or the government that my account is legitimate – or attempting to regain control in the case of being hacked.

There’s also a question here about how ‘communities’ function under corporate control. Instagram’s services are free to me, and my ad-blockers does mean I am not an ideal user. I am there on their sufferance. There is no offer of any help to regain the account. An algorithm has made a decision and I cannot contact a human to appeal. Their service, their rules.