Fifty-Five: Finite Scroll (11-17-2023)
I got my first smartphone at age 14, several years after most of peers had already had phones or internet-enabled ipods. When I was much younger, my family had a Dell desktop with a chunky CRT monitor (which we shortsightedly rid ourselves of), which may have had internet access, though I only used it for dinosaur CD-ROM games and Mist, which I was scared of and incapable of understanding. Within a year of having a smartphone, I had instagram and snapchat, both then in their relative infancy. I never became much of a user of either, obsessively considering myself too-cool for social media, though at various points in adolescence, I did fall victim to the exacerbating social affects of social media. Public school social dynamics should not play out past the hours of seven to three PM, and yet with such connectivity, they fester and iterate throughout the day.
My young cousins are all "ipad kids", a distinction coined recently that is no distinction at all, because I seldom see any child without a placating ipad in public. The parenting allure of instantly calming and distracting a child at any time with flashing screens and incessant noise is obvious, it's the latest innovation in offloading any parental responsibility. Boomers and Xers love to preach their glorious freedom in childhood, the neighborhoods they explored and wilderness they experienced (and promptly bulldozed or priced their children out of), but do not understand the parallel technological frontier the youngest generation is exploring. This frontier is not the wild-west internet, which I only briefly was fortunately exposed to, which no longer exists, but a techno-hellscape of gambling games, low-effort high-dope content and brain-melting colorscapes.
I'm no authority to predict or diagnose the damage that the ipad and iphone will have on children born after 2005. I am barely, but still so, qualified to report the damage it has done to my cohort. I ride the bus to work, with a demographic ridership skewed to yuppy 25-40 year olds, who are all glued to the endless scroll and AI voices of tiktok or its competitors. I make a concious effort to not be on my own phone during this time, but the isolating aspect of not participating in this dooming cycle of swipe and scroll is obvious- I cannot interact face-to-face when no one else is. I can only reach others through the phones they are on, even if they are feet away. My girlfriend and I call the bus the modern public forum, for its socioeconomic equalizing and promotion of low-stakes debate and bemoaning of common woes, but it can sometimes become an Orwellian display of self-flagulation.
I feel I am at or approaching the end of my scroll. I am not the only one feeling this way, though still part of a minority. I know some few people who are giving up social media, slowly and with much difficulty, detoxing not unlike drug addicts. There is not much left out there. No organic communities form anew, and old communities are being slowly eroded by corporate content and AI... creations?
I'm bored of social media. I've found some partial respite in substack, hitherto an unexplored region of the internet for many, but still replete with the dopamine-mining features of other social media sites. The encouragement of longform content and vested research is promising, but the notes section and the echo chamber formation of recommendation networks is disappointing. I find writers with similar opinions passing around each others writing as justification for their latest uninteresting point, or mindlessly debating minutae in a way that evokes but does not approach the forum-fighting of yore.
So I spend less time online. Apple's screen time tracking tells me I spend two hours or less on my phone a day, mostly on twitter, seconded by browsing Apple Music or podcasts. I'm shocked when I hear of eight-plus hour users, I simply cannot imagine where they have found a well of such engaging content that would justify an entire workday of time on their phone.
Research shows that people are not happy with social media, and do not report benefits from it, across all demographics. People resent the abundant connectivity. So now that OpenAI and inhuman algorithm has flooded feeds, they will, with time, just stop tuning in. The real world is far more interesting.