August 3, 2019

On Twitter: thoughts preliminary and limited, but settling, too (Across the Sundering Seas, #25)

Hello, readers!

It has been almost two months since I cut Twitter out of my life, and I have been mulling a bit over the last few weeks about the change. My thoughts here are preliminary in many ways, as it should be, I think. As I read recently:

I propose that by science we understand an attempt at comprehension and exposition, at investigation and instructions, which is related to a definite object and sphere of activity. No act of man can claim to be more than an attempt, not even science. By describing it as an attempt, we are simply stating its nature as preliminary and limited. Wherever science is taken in practice completely seriously, we are under no illusion that anything man can do can ever be an undertaking of supreme wisdom and final art, that there exists an absolute science, one that as it were has fallen from heaven.
—Karl Barth, Dogmatics in Outline

But though preliminary and limited, they are also increasingly feeling settled. Not in the sense that my views can never change; never that. More that I have reached some conclusions, and I have considered the situation enough to know that no arguments currently on offer will change my mind. If nothing else: the experience of the last few months has been evidence enough that I made the right call as things are in the world at present.

As I wrote in that initial farewell to the platform (and indeed to social media in general), I have come to find my attention increasingly precious. That feeling is magnified when I am busy with many things at work and in the life of our church and even with side projects. I not have minutes, much less hours, in the week I wish to spend on the frivolities and banalities of Twitter. Not to say that everything that comes across the platform is frivolous or banal, of course, or that there are no equally absurd things elsewhere in life. But the proportions matter. Twitter is dominated by those things, and when serious subjects come up, the medium leads to the worst sorts of takes on those subjects. Facebook brings out a different sort of folly, but not any less.

As such there is very little I miss. Not nothing, but certainly not enough to make up for those gains.

The gains are just the sort of mental quietude I was hoping for. Nothing spectacular here to report—just as one would expect. Getting off Twitter and Facebook isn’t some life-changing, earth-shattering event. Instead, it is a slow return to what once was normalcy for my mind. I have found it steadily becoming easier to read long, dense material without thinking “I should tweet this quote” or otherwise being distracted by my phone. (An aside: I have also found it easier not to have my phone with me, because the habits and rhythms which kept me engaged with it are gone.)

It is no silver bullet, of course. (Nothing is!) I can still distract myself from hard work or from projects I feel unmotivated to finish. (Real talk: writing this newsletter is in the “distracting myself from just such a project” bucket at the moment. Lucky you!) But even insofar as those are inescapable parts of the human condition, eliminating some of the worst encouragements of those vices has been good for me. I may occasionally find myself checking for updates in my RSS reader but… well, precisely by the nature of the medium (and a well-curated set of feeds, not too high in volume!) there is simply a lot less distraction even available there. And I find it much easier to pick up again the book I’m reading¹ and dig into it than to keep flicking through things on my phone, when there just isn’t much to look at on my phone.

As I expected, keeping up with the technical communities I’m a part of has been straightforward. They have forums and chat communities I can (and to a limited extent do) participate in; those are more than sufficient to the task.

I feel the urge to check in sometimes, still, of cousre. But it gets easier and easier every day to ignore that when it does come up, and it also comes up less and less frequently. It’s a little bit amazing how these media which work so hard to feel vital—and to such a large degree succeed in feeling so—raelly just fade back away if we let them. They really don’t matter. They aren’t vital. We lived without them for millennia. We can live without them now, and easily.

I have started pondering how we might take back some of the goods we have relegated to Twitter: public conversation, professional connection, the making-of-friends-across-the-wide-world. For these are indeed goods, and I have enjoyed them as the fruit of my engagement on social media in the past. But we cannot get them at the great costs we are currently paying for them, in the life of our minds, in the health of our communities, in the structure of our discourse.

When I have something to say on that—even if it be preliminary and limited—well, you’ll hear it here.