Throw off the chains of fast social media

April 2, 2018 10:07 AM

The author of Deep Work describes how to benefit from the Social Internet without being consumed by Social Media. Practicing slow social media allows you to maintain the hard to replace value that these services might provide you, while at the same time neutering their ability to transform you into a pawn in their algorithmic attention economy games.

[P]art of the power of the social media business model is that it introduces a type of attention collectivism, where I’ll promise to pretend to care what you have to say (by clicking “like” or leaving a quick comment), if you do the same for me. This is incredibly seductive, though ultimately hollow.

(be sure to save this post as a FAVORITE)

posted by mecran01 (29 comments total)

For those who want recognition, this reality provides a useful forcing function for helping them through the deliberate work of cultivating thoughts worth sharing.

I don't think the human desire to have one's existence acknowledged by a chosen peer group is exactly the same as wanting fame and widespread attention. Even before the advent of modern Big Brother style social media, there were lurkers on LJalikes (who wanted to engage with others in commenting but posted little on their own blogs), people who exclusively frequented BB-style forums, etc.
posted by inconstant at 10:17 AM on April 2, 2018 [2 favorites]

I don't think the average social media user perceives the value of that media in anywhere near the same way the author does; then again, I can't tell whether he is actually directing this advice at the average user. (Probably not; the average user has already forgotten that there was ever anything wrong with Facebook.)
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 10:25 AM on April 2, 2018

For me, the key (for Facebook anyway) was to unfollow everybody except my wife and kids, none of whom post more than once or twice a month anyway. The wall is what distracts you, and since my wall is basically empty it's much easier for me to pop into FB for those specific "high-value" use cases, which for me are events and several private groups, and then leave, since there is nothing on my wall that will distract me into a 30 minute rabbit hole.

When I have 30 minutes and want to catch up with friends I simply click through to their walls to see what they've been up to.
posted by COD at 10:27 AM on April 2, 2018 [2 favorites]

These kinds of thinkpieces always make me think of when I was a smoker and I was "trying to cut back," or of alcoholics who try to manage their addiction by only drinking beer.

Social media is intentionally designed to be addictive. They use tricks that we all know work super well, like providing intermittent rewards in the form of notifications for likes and comments. It's no surprise that people get hooked.

More and more, I'm starting to think that this shit is just unhealthy. Now that everything is so thoroughly gamified, human interaction via social media can all too easily become an addictive game. It's getting harder and harder to justify the value of some of these platforms.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 10:34 AM on April 2, 2018 [10 favorites]

The real secret to breaking from social media is to stop having friends.

(and the secret to quitting overeating is to stop having a mouth...)
posted by notsnot at 10:37 AM on April 2, 2018 [8 favorites]

depending on your milieu there may be significant professional advancement to be had from networking on Twitter or Facebook. it's never mandatory, of course. i think there's a fair analogy to everybody at work but you going out for a smoke break.

I don't think the recent anti-Facebook backlash is really organic. I think people who work in media have been ill-treated by Facebook perhaps more than any other group of people -- decisions at Facebook have driven down wages, made their jobs more difficult and less rewarding, and often resulted in people being laid off -- and that's what's driving all these stories. however, i'm glad that deleting facebook is now seen as a mainstream choice as opposed to a weird eccentricity.
posted by vogon_poet at 10:45 AM on April 2, 2018 [10 favorites]

analogy to everybody at work but you going out for a smoke break.

Once I was wanting to hang with the cool group but don't smoke. There's an ancient 5&10 nearby and I found, candy cigarettes! (how those are even available) It was a cute one time joke but there are options. Never had a problem with FB or twitter but do kill a lot of time here... Mifinterventions(tm)
posted by sammyo at 11:01 AM on April 2, 2018

There's an ancient 5&10 nearby and I found, candy cigarettes!

Those candies had a cigarette-paper wrapping, and there was powdered sugar in the wrapping so the kiddies could blow in the candy cigarette and produce a little puff of "smoke" out the other end.
posted by StickyCarpet at 11:30 AM on April 2, 2018 [1 favorite]

I deleted my Facebook last week, but it was more due to a long-term discomfort with Facebook's model of sociability, which is the equivalent of a family funeral reception with everyone up in each other's business. I'd rather just email people what I feel comfortable sharing with them.
posted by GenderNullPointerException at 11:49 AM on April 2, 2018 [1 favorite]

A number of interesting corollary benefits to slow social media are enumerated by Farhad Manjoo in his recent NYT's article: For Two Months, I Got My News From Print Newspapers. Here’s What I Learned.
posted by fairmettle at 11:55 AM on April 2, 2018 [2 favorites]

depending on your milieu there may be significant professional advancement to be had from networking on Twitter or Facebook. it's never mandatory, of course. i think there's a fair analogy to everybody at work but you going out for a smoke break.

Facebook has actually made this even more of a thing: Workplace. TL;DR: it's a Facebook platform for companies. You sign up with your work email address. Or you get signed up, because it's your company's email address, not yours, and they've decided to move everything to Workplace. ask me how i know.

It still boggles my mind that companies that claim to have privacy as one of their core concerns would use this thing, but they do indeed.
posted by fraula at 12:20 PM on April 2, 2018 [3 favorites]

So my question to Cal Newport's suggestion is everyone did Slow Media, what would be the actual effect on social justice discourse? Would we still have awareness about microaggressions and forms of privilege, and not have individuals' blog websites being "socially DDoSed", or in other words sea-lioned or JAQ'd, by people who "disagree"?

Like, how would that proposal actually work and play out. Am I begging the question by positing that Slow Media (under Newport's conception) would disproportionately impact vulnerable groups and their ability to have meaningful discourse? Because I'm suggesting one consequence of that would just be a push towards more libertarian-conservative attitudes.
posted by polymodus at 1:58 PM on April 2, 2018 [1 favorite]

There are Facebook news feed blockers for Chrome and Firefox. I find myself deleting my account completely every 6-7 months and then rejoining after 3-4 months when I realize I longer have contact with a handful of friends. I do email people a lot more during the off periods, however. I have yet to establish my own webstite, however.
posted by mecran01 at 2:11 PM on April 2, 2018

The real secret to breaking from social media is to stop having friends.


Or to not think clicking on 'like' is a valid way to interact with your friends.
posted by signal at 2:17 PM on April 2, 2018 [3 favorites]

Facebook is, of course, also a group chat platform, event planning space, way to interact with private groups of likeminded people...

I agree with all the criticisms of Facebook! But to say that people engage with and value it because of 'likes' always seems both counter-productive and a total misunderstanding of what people actually use facebook for.
posted by sagc at 2:23 PM on April 2, 2018 [3 favorites]

So my question to Cal Newport's suggestion is everyone did Slow Media, what would be the actual effect on social justice discourse? Would we still have awareness about microaggressions and forms of privilege, and not have individuals' blog websites being "socially DDoSed", or in other words sea-lioned or JAQ'd, by people who "disagree"?

Just my perspective, one of the reasons that I never really used Facebook (and noped out of Tumblr) was the pressures of self-censorship. On the one hand, I didn't want to be on the hook to do LGBTQ 101 on demand. On the other hand, I didn't want to be involved in the perpetual snipe fest over trivialities.

A lot of social justice discourse isn't social justice or discourse anymore. And I think systems design has a lot ot blame on that score. The feedback mechanisms are rewarding the wrong types of conversation, and I'm not interested in contributing to systems that reward online bullying.
posted by GenderNullPointerException at 2:24 PM on April 2, 2018 [8 favorites]

For me, the key (for Facebook anyway) was to unfollow everybody except my wife and kids.

I follow just 15 people on Facebook and that seems about the right number. I think this is the step missing from the article "only follow people who are really important to you"
Too many people are trying to follow hundreds or even thousands of contacts/accounts and thats just an impossible firehose of content to keep on top of, unless you want to dedicate your life to it.
posted by Lanark at 2:45 PM on April 2, 2018

Recently I unfollowed everybody on Facebook who I didn't personally know and like. Got down to 278. I still feel I could cut another 100 or so.
Did the same thing on twitter, only here I kept some writers and artists I admire but don't know. Got down to 386. Could probably halve that if I tried.
Instagram I another deal. I only use it when I need an introduction to some random person I don't know, so I accept every single invitation and never delete anybody. 1083.
posted by signal at 2:55 PM on April 2, 2018

Also, the linked article isn't #DumpFacebook, it's: "Only use a given social media service if it provides valuable benefits that would be hard to replace. Use these services only for these purposes." If you manage events on Facebook, log in, manage your event, like things only if necessary for event-management, and log out.
posted by GenderNullPointerException at 3:09 PM on April 2, 2018 [1 favorite]

Early on I set up a few different friend lists in my FB account (core friends, professional, etc.) so now I can decide exactly which groups I want to see any particular post of mine, and I can just look at posts by my closest peeps. That plus an ad blocker means I generally have a delightful experience on FB...
posted by PhineasGage at 3:21 PM on April 2, 2018

Here's an extension for deleting old posts
posted by mecran01 at 4:32 PM on April 2, 2018 [1 favorite]

He's right about the seductive nature of attention collectivism, but I think that's a feature of all social groups, or even the back-and-forth of any in-person conversation--you pretend to be interested in my shit and I'll pretend to be interested in yours (and of course sometimes we'll both mean it). It's a pretty fundamental pot of honey for humans and there's nothing intrinsically wrong with it. If you can be satisfied with a smaller audience, you can get the same or even greater satisfaction with a permanent group-text group. I've had one for years with a few of my best friends and we treat it exactly as you do FB, except that it requires a lot less self-censorship. It scratches the same itch that FB scratches. The reason your average FB user isn't going to build their own website is because all they want to do is fire off cute pictures of their dog and have people say "aw." You don't have to sell your soul to Mark Zuckerberg to do that.
posted by HotToddy at 4:43 PM on April 2, 2018

Yeah, his primary audience is American IT workers.
posted by GenderNullPointerException at 6:32 PM on April 2, 2018

Bob Vulfov:

ME: man i wish i remembered my dream from last night
FACEBOOK: ur childhood dentist was chasing u thru a forest. the trees were screaming. and the dentist was wearing l.l.bean boots, which u can buy for $119.99 if u click on this ad
ME: nice thanks
FACEBOOK: :)
ME: wait a minute

posted by Johnny Wallflower at 6:51 PM on April 2, 2018 [2 favorites]

Can I get some recognition for never joining facebook? I do a tech job, I have a tech degree, and five, six, seven years ago people were fucking astonished I'm not on facebook. Back when it was new, I just thought 'this is a massive security risk, not a vector I need to bother with'. And then the galling overstep crept in. Every time people asked me, did you know they were doing this new horror? Yeah, I knew, I predicted it and told you.

They ask me because I'm a techie. I've seen it on bbs, irc, usenet, forums, now it's not some tech-niche but something accessible to absolutely anyone. I'm not surprised at all.

Is this finally my chance to say I told you so?
posted by adept256 at 9:01 PM on April 2, 2018 [2 favorites]

🏆
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 10:32 PM on April 2, 2018 [3 favorites]

Is this finally my chance to say I told you so?

I put off joining Facebook until 2011 sometime for ... reasons.

What changed my mind was somebody saying, "Think of it as speaking into an open mike to a room full of mostly people you know where everything is recorded. And then remind yourself that you're really not that important."

Now, seven years late, it continues to connect me to great music that I wouldn't otherwise be aware of, so it can't be pure evil.
posted by philip-random at 11:55 PM on April 2, 2018

The real problem with this whole approach isn't so much that it isn't realistic, but rather, that once again it puts the onus of fixing the faults with social media on the user rather than the companies that deliberately set out to make it awful.

Twitter and Youtube will keep promoting nazis whether or not I responsibly use their platforms or not.

Facebook is a confusing, shitty mess not because people use it irresponsibly but because that makes it more useable for advertisers.

Social media is made much more addictive than it should be because that's how these companies make money.
posted by MartinWisse at 12:02 AM on April 3, 2018 [5 favorites]

Facebook was remarkably easy for me to cut back on. I just unfollowed anyone I didn't genuinely care about (i.e. hadn't had a meaningful conversation in the last year). With only 20 or so people showing up in my feed, it takes 5 seconds every day to see people's cute kid pictures and respond to event invites and go on to something else. More distant friends message me a lot on it (they don't have my phone number), but again that usually only takes a minute or two to deal with.

Twitter, likewise, was easy to cut down to just once or twice a week. It's full of Nazis. I'm Jewish and have a very Jewish name. Anything I post is going to be subject to violent abuse from Nazis. No thanks. I just try to post something smart-sounding occasionally, because people apparently do consider your number of followers some kind of social cachet for speaking at conferences and guest blogging and such.

LinkedIn is good to keep around but it's never taken much of my time.

The really, really hard one to give up has been a private Slack group for people in my profession that is filled with many incredibly smart, helpful, kind people. I have no trouble wasting the entire day on there and getting absolutely nothing of my own done. I actually think this is the future of social media: small, tightly-knit groups of strangers with a few things in common. But because it's so much more useful, it's much more difficult to give it up. Still wrestling with this.
posted by miyabo at 6:09 AM on April 3, 2018 [1 favorite]