Several years ago, I quit Facebook and never looked back. There hasn’t been a time when I regretted the decision or somehow looked with envy upon those well-connected friends of mine who get all they need to know from Social Media. I even began questioning what the definition of “need to know” was (or is), and, by and large, haven’t gotten a clear answer in the years since. I am happy not knowing about Jane’s new puppy or kitten, or Buffy’s new car. I don’t, as it turns out, “need to know.”
American and other international companies seized upon Facebook as an advertising medium almost unparalleled in the history of the world. This was, of course, Mark Zuckerberg’s secret sauce all along. The service is free to users (“and always will be,” he says), but it reminds me of the old adage, “when a product is free, YOU are the product.” Everything you do on the Net is somehow shoveled into Facebook’s engines and helps advertisers target you incessantly. You are indeed the product.
I have a hunch that while America is perhaps at its most polarized, politically and otherwise, there is a developing sense that Facebook and its ilk (Instagram, Snapchat, et al) are not as good for us as we might have otherwise believed. I hope so.
The mob reaction to the Covington High School event is ample evidence. It took a Facebook-nano-second for the boys of Covington to get their almighty due in the court of public opinion. Reputations were ruined and lives turned all but upside down. Sad to see in what is supposed to be the most civilized nation on earth (it isn’t, not by a long shot).
Dr. Calvin Newport, a Georgetown University professor, was interviewed this week in the Wall Street Journal and had plenty to say about that event and the whole of social media. He teaches computer science at the renown D.C. campus.
“Because I don’t have any social-media accounts,” he said, “my encounter with the Covington Catholic controversy was much different than most people’s. I read about the event days later in an old-fashioned newspaper column and learned that the social-media reaction had been incendiary and basically everyone was now upset at each other, at themselves, at technology itself. It sounded exhausting.”
One of the seminal pieces I came across when researching my own doctoral dissertation was Newport’s 2010 piece entitled, An Argument for Quitting Facebook. It was a blog post that came with instructions on how to deactivate your account. I followed his instructions and left Facebook about a year later.
“Technologies are great,” he wrote, “but if you want to keep control of your time and attention,” you should “insist that they earn their keep before you make them a regular part of your life.”
Newport has never had a social-media account and jokes that such a public turning-inward, as it were, is lawful and not the least bit anti-social. More to the point, he noticed that social media was impairing our ability to concentrate; yes, concentrate, which, as grandma often told you, is an “essential skill for professional and personal success.”
Right around the transition to mobile [from desktop computers], Newport observed that for many people a passing interest in social media was morphing into “compulsive use.” It tapped what is probably a human tendency to seize upon the so-called gambler’s fallacy (“I gotta keep playing this slot machine; it’ll pay off on the next hit I’m sure!”).
The transition to mobile meant that checking social media became a hand-held event. And phones were everywhere, including the grocery store line. Still, it was a slower-moving medium. You might update your “wall” (as it was known then) only occasionally, and if you went on to check what your friends were up to in the morning, there would be no reason to check in the afternoon. Nothing had changed.
But then it did change. The smartphone, via Apple’s App Store and its agreement with Facebook to load software on every iPhone sold, made the practice far easier and thereby rendered social media as ubiquitous, which suited the commercial interests of social-media companies just fine, thank you. User-engagement numbers tripled, then quadrupled.
Then came the “Like” button, along with Google’s “Plus” and Twitter’s “Follow Me,” the modern-era equivalent of three cherries on a slot-machine. Cal Newport refers to them as “small indicators of approval.”
Well, not so small. These Likes, Follows, and Plusses provided “a much richer stream of information coming back to the user,” which proved even more seductive. The reinforcement is all the more insidious for being intermittent. Sometimes you’re rewarded for checking in, sometimes you’re frustrated. It short-circuits the dopamine system and feeds the compulsion. It’s like having a slot machine at your desk.
Facebook added to the compulsion by introducing facial recognition, yet another “small indicator of approval.” And one more reason to keep playing the social-media-slot-machine.
All of this, with Cal Newport’s help, led me to end my slot-machine habit. Seriously, have I missed anything by not being on Facebook? Anything important? My answer is an unequivocal “no.” And contrary to Mark Zuckerberg’s assurances, and because I am not on the porous Facebook, my privacy has therefore remained intact. Notwithstanding Zuck’s commitment to “everyone having a voice and being able to connect,” I seem to be fine connecting in far more personal and immediate ways.
All the “connecting” and “voicing” on social media, to me, adds up to nothing more than an annoying static, the modern-day equivalent of so much cosmic noise. Witness the Covington Catholic fracas. “Is anyone better off for having wasted hours and hours of time this past week exhaustively engaging half-formed back-and-forth yelling on social media?” Dr. Newport asks.
“On reflection, the answer is yes for one group in particular: the executives at the giant social-media conglomerates, who sucked up all those extra ‘user engagement’ minutes like an oil tycoon who just hit a gusher.”
Only Zuckerberg got rich, just like the tycoons of the 1800s. The user reaped nothing, except for agitation and negativity.
“When I talk to people now who are very distressed about their digital life,” he says, “it’s not political things that they care about.” Instead, he says, people are beginning to say, “I’m on this more than is useful, more than is healthy. It’s keeping me from my kids. It’s keeping me from my friends. It’s keeping me from things I used to enjoy. I think it’s hurting the quality of my life.”
You cannot un-ring a bell, to be sure, and social media is here to stay, Still, he says, “we should have been warier about this idea of taking human sociality —incredibly powerful and shaped by a million years of evolution —and allowing 22-year-olds in California to reinvent it.”
Newport laments that everyone “writes the same article with tips for turning off notifications or some such. This is not working. What people need is a full-fledged philosophy of how to use technology.”
I have come to participate in Newport’s experiment he calls a “digital declutter,” or what I call a “digital cleanse.” I even went so far as to invest in old typewriters.
Instead, I’d rather spend my days figuring out what I’d like to do with my time, including … nothing at all. In the end, you see, human beings crave “high-quality leisure.” Facebook and its ilk are, to my mind, low-quality.
And, so, like Cal Newport, I am glad I don’t own Facebook stock. In business parlance, Facebook has what is known as a very weak connection to their user base, a user-base that is much fickler than they probably want to admit, simply because people like me are fine walking away from it.
And walk away I did.
In part two we will take a closer look at Newport’s ideas around our declining ability to focus, to concentrate, and how social media has played a role.
