Escaping the social media spiral
‘God I hate Twitter. I’m never going on that website again.’
I texted that to a friend yesterday.
Then I checked Twitter a couple minutes later.
What do you do when your social media habits are making you feel awful, but you can’t stop scrolling? How do you break the habit?
The information spiral
Social media can be many things. Both genuinely useful, and utterly addictive - it’s a grab bag of the best and worst of us.
Before the pandemic really hit, I was already feeling uncomfortable about just how much time I was spending on Twitter and news websites, and how that was making me feel.
Whether it was the bushfires or world politics, most days I found myself stuck in some version of the information spiral.
The information spiral goes like this:
You feel anxious or uncomfortable about the state of the world.
You think: if only I had more information, maybe I’d feel better?
So you check social media, you check the news, and inevitably you find something that makes you feel even more anxious.
Repeat as necessary.
The information spiral (pandemic edition)
In a pandemic, this whole thing gets revved up even further.
What started as an attempt to reassure myself (‘I’ll just check if there’s any major news to be aware of’) over time has morphed into a habit that looks the same but feels very different.
Opening my phone each morning, it's like I rub my hands together and say:
‘Alright people, tell me what to feel terrified / outraged / despairing about today!’
I check the news, I check Twitter.
I feel even more itchy, anxious, in need of distraction. So I do it all again.
I think my newsfeed is depressed
For me, my worst offender is Twitter. The news sites I can mostly handle. I try to stick to news sources that don’t have overly alarmist headlines.
But Twitter is different.
This year I’ve begun to notice just how closely my Twitter feed resembles my brain at its most depressed.
Screeds of catastrophic thinking (‘Hey remember this scary thing?? Here’s why it’s even worse than it looks! THREAD’). Endless judgements and recriminations, and an emotional palette reduced to two main colours: anger and fear.
(Plus the occasional video of a bird dancing to trap music. For balance.)
Maybe it’s the state of the world right now, or maybe I’m just not curating my feed well enough. But I’ve begun to wonder if it’s simply the nature of the medium itself.
A frictionless space
Matt Christman calls social media - and Twitter in particular - ‘a frictionless space’. It’s a space where people can interact, but without any of the usual context or guardrails we're used to.
Normally when you meet a stranger, you don’t dive right into deep and controversial territory. If for some reason you do, there are things that keep it from escalating too quickly from disagreement to full-blown aggression.
First of all, you don’t want to seem like a dick, so you make at least some half-hearted gestures toward the other person’s position. These gestures sometimes become genuinely fruitful openings to, if not agreement, at least an understanding of how the other person reached their current beliefs.
(You definitely don’t tend to stop the conversation and yell, ‘Hey everybody! Get a load of what this guy just said!’)
Secondly, you just have much more information about the other person when they’re physically there in front of you. Their physical presence, their voice, their gestures and expression, these all remind you of the obvious but crucial point: that this is another person you’re talking to. A person with their own history, their own experiences that have shaped their views.
Christman says this ‘friction’ - rubbing shoulders with actual real live humans - it slows down the propensity toward snap judgements and ungenerous assumptions. Beyond just keeping things civil, it forces us to find common ground, if there is some to be found.
On social media, there is none of that context, so there’s no friction. Disagreements escalate at the speed of your internet connection.
Me vs the world
You get swept up in this dynamic, even if, like me, you're a chronic social media lurker.
If every Twitter deep-dive is a gallery of the worst of human communication, over time, this starts to shape the way you see the world, whether you take part or not.
On social media, when someone says something you disagree with, that statement is often the only information you have about them. This makes it very easy to then characterise that person as that statement - to identify them as ‘a person who disagrees with you’, rather than as a person who made a statement you disagree with.
This has all sorts of ramifications for human interaction, the spread of information, the health of public discourse, but here I’m more interested in the effect it has on moi, the individual scroller.
The upshot is this. I start to think I live in a world divided into those who ‘get it’, and those who don’t. I start to think I live in a world surrounded by enemies and bad actors.
Or, if I’m honest, I already felt that way. My nervous system is wired such that I live my life on high alert, always on the lookout for possible threats. Add something like Twitter in the mix and it’s like throwing fuel on a fire.
Bodie's even more strung out than I am. I probably shouldn't have given him a cell phone.
‘The truth’ of human nature
The frictionless quality of social media that Matt Christman points out, I think often we take that to mean that online interactions must be somehow ‘more true’ than real life ones.
We think that, minus the usual rules of polite society, the internet allows us to see what people really think. Twitter (or the comments on a news website) are a chance to see behind the mask, and it sure is ugly to look at a lot of the time.
But I’ve been wondering if that’s an overly simplistic reading of what’s going on. The frictionless space of online interactions doesn’t necessarily make them more representative of how people really are. It simply makes those interactions more likely to escalate. It loads the dice for snarky, aggressive interactions that may reveal something about the people involved, but reveal just as much about the medium through which they’re having this exchange.
To put it simply. 90% of Twitter is just road rage. (Which, as we’ve seen, also leaves me feeling pretty wary of my fellow humans!)
This myth, that the online world is somehow ‘more true’, I think it’s part of what keeps bringing me back to my Twitter feed. If this is the true face of the worst of human interaction, I at least want to see it, so I know what I’m dealing with.
As someone who finds it hard to trust in the kindness of strangers at the best of times, this is not a recipe for feeling safer and more at home in the world.
So... why do I still open Twitter every day?
Well that’s the thing hey. We can see the way something is affecting us, and still it’s so hard to leave it alone.
Longtime Big Feels collaborator Gareth Edwards puts it this way. Sometimes you ‘make’ a decision long before you can ‘take’ a decision. Sometimes you know what’s right for you, but for various reasons you can’t yet act on that decision.
In my case, I think I’ve already made the decision that I want to get off social media. I just haven’t been able to ‘take’ that decision in any lasting way. Not yet anyway.
So here are three things I’ve been doing lately, to help me curb my unwanted Twittering. Maybe they’ll eventually lead to quitting it completely, or maybe not. But they're definitely helping.
#1: Logging out
About two weeks ago I logged out of my Twitter account.
Logging out is not a real barrier. My password is saved, so I’m really only one extra click away from another scroll-hole.
But it’s a reminder. When I inevitably bring up Twitter again, out of habit in the middle of my workday, there’s the login screen reminding me, ‘oh that’s right, I’m not doing this today.’
What I’ve found is, in that moment, I might decide to log in anyway. But I might not. On many days, simply logging out has taken me from checking Twitter about 30 times a day to checking it two or three times.
#2: Acknowledging the limits of my control
Then of course on other days, I'll still find myself in an hour-long scroll-hole, feeling guilty and annoyed at myself afterwards.
When you’re stuck on an unwanted habit, it’s very easy to get fed up with yourself. ‘I know I don’t want to do this anymore, I must be a sucker for punishment.’
The problem is, the more you judge yourself, the more anxious and itchy you feel, which tends to lead you right back to that same old, unwanted habit.
I’ve found it useful recently to frame it a little differently.
It’s true, I’m not in control of my social media habits. If I was, I wouldn’t be visiting a website that reliably makes me feel like shit.
So okay, I’m not in control.
Acknowledging that has had an unexpected effect. Rather than give me an excuse to go diving back into Twitter, it’s allowed me the space to judge myself a little less when I do. A space to get curious.
Okay, I’m not in control. If that’s true, how much am I not in control? What do I have control over? Can I pause in this moment I’m about to hit the ‘login’ button again? Can I make a different choice here?
And finally, #3: Seeking out what I’m really looking for
Sometimes it is just distraction I’m after, but usually there’s something underneath. That original impulse to log on often comes from a place of looking for reassurance.
For so long, my assumption has been that reassurance comes from information. Information about what’s happening in the world. Information about who it is that people are angry with on the internet today (and just double checking to make sure it isn’t, somehow, me...)
I’ve started to question this assumption, that reassurance comes from having more information.
Where else might I find reassurance, if not through information?
Connection with other people. Reminding myself that - even as big world events spiral and people continue to be dickheads to one another on the internet - the people around me aren’t threats.
I’ve been saying hello to strangers on my morning walk (an activity I historically loathe). The masks make it harder, but they also lower the stakes. I’ve just been doing a little head nod. And if that somehow goes awkwardly, well they can’t see my face anyway (suckers!)
I’ve even been to two Zoom hangouts this past week(!). And you know what? Sure they’re awkward sometimes, but for me right now - they’re way better than Twitter...
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Kinder Mind: a handful of spots left
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