I wake up, try to avoid opening my phone, hit snooze, then convince myself that scrolling will wake me up. I skim Twitter or Instagram for a few minutes before deciding I need to consume something more nutritious. I open Substack or The New Yorker app.
I get anxious about wasting my attention on the wrong words or sounds. My best ideas always come to me after a day of avoiding stimulation, consciously staying away from social media, music, podcasts. And yet since I am usually examining the internet itself, the scrolling and listening and consuming is what sparks the thoughts and questions that precede the ideas. So I resign myself to a repetitive cycle of aversion and compulsion, deleting and redownloading apps, resisting and caving to the screen. I have no way of encountering new content without my apps, and so I find them unavoidable.
I first engaged deeply with the internet through Facebook and YouTube. I remember how exciting it felt to be a high schooler joining collegiate Facebook groups like UC Berkeley Memes for Edgy Teens, tagging my friends under relatable posts, using humor to cope with the stress of college applications. The memes in my feed interspersed themselves between news articles updating us on elections we couldn’t vote in and tragedies beyond our control. In my free time, I watched beauty routines and room tours of generation-defining YouTubers like Bethany Mota, Michelle Phan and Zoella. The content I sought was a manifestation of my ideal self, a projection of the desires of a teenager eager to feel pretty, fit in with her friends, and make sense of her world.
Being online gave me my first chance to decide who I wanted to be. I tended to dozens of Pinterest mood boards, made my first playlists, and spent hours deciding on my profile photos. Growing up in a household where I wasn’t allowed to spend much on music or interior decor, these free platforms were the first windows I had into discovering my own taste.
In and after college, it was on Twitter that I encountered tech content that interested me, found my first job, realized that I was allowed to disagree with people more accomplished than myself. Platforms like Facebook and Twitter were polarizing, anger inducing, and full of social pressure, but they democratized opinion, teaching young adults like me the valuable lesson that our thoughts mattered.
Something significant has changed over the last several years — my phone has been infiltrated by the mindless scroll. I find myself drowning in content that barely triggers an opinion in me, let alone a serious action. Short form content is everywhere, be it in short-form specific feeds on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube or in the shortening of content across platforms at large. News articles have transformed into soundbites, LinkedIn posts have turned into engagement bait, TV seasons grow increasingly shorter. Even the New York Times app is home to a personalized scrollable feed.
We complain about these apps, we fight against the shrinking of our attention spans, and yet we cannot leave. This is the most efficient way to be online, to decide what to buy, what to read, what to discuss with our friends. I discover new fashion trends on Instagram, hunt for product reviews on TikTok, chance upon the news on Twitter. Each of these activities is infested with interruptions and distracted scrolling, but to me there’s no superior alternative.
Jia Tolentino said about algorithmic recommendations in 2018:
“It’s as if we’ve been placed on a lookout that oversees the entire world and given a pair of binoculars that makes everything look like our own reflection. Through social media, many people have quickly come to view all new information as a sort of direct commentary on who they are.”
We used to craft our identities offline and seek connection online. Now we craft our identities online and lack connection offline. We used to go on the internet to find people like us, now we go to the internet to find out who we are. The web used to be our window to the world, now it’s become more of a mirror.
Jia’s observation compounds itself in the arena of short form content, where algorithmically curated feeds barely factor in the behavior of our social graph. This type of curation carries an interesting dichotomy of being entirely personal yet based on minimal information. The algorithm might know that half-asleep Anita spends a few seconds longer on videos with red dresses than pink lace, or babies instead of dogs, and bases my entire content experience around these indicators. Microtrends and niche aesthetics exploit my desire for attention and self-identification by pushing me to tag myself as ‘mob wife’ or ‘tomato girl’, phrases that carry no more meaning than answers to a BuzzFeed quiz.
We often identify with the content we choose to consume. There is a pride in selecting displays on our bookshelves, assembling mood boards on our Pinterest profiles, sharing playlists we’ve put together. This is a sentiment that is absent when we consume mass media — my choice of radio station or TV channel says less about me than the presenter on air. But who listens to the radio or cable TV anymore? What happens when all media is personalized media, when social media is replaced by recommendation media? What happens when the media ecosystem prioritizes our subconscious choices over our conscious ones?
Consumption and collection used to be acts of sustained time and effort. The development of identity, of figuring out who we are and what we like, used to require patience, introspection, and socialization. Short form media rushes this process of self-definition, contriving preferences and classifications for people before they learn to articulate them. It risks creating a generation trained on entertainment over knowledge, a generation who experiences significant dissonance between the labels placed on them and who they actually are.
Zadie Smith on being a teenager today:
“I imagine I would be having a very hard time deciding if what I actually willed was what I appeared to be willing.”
What would the future look like if we became more aware of the autonomy we give up to engage with today’s media platforms? How do we reclaim control over our content consumption experiences? What are ways to add intentionality to our internet use? These are the questions I’ve been contemplating lately.
If these topics resonate, I’d love to hear from you! I’m looking develop my thoughts on the relationship between identity, media, and the internet, and am always down for a chat or coffee :)
Sincerely,
Anita
As always, some music for your time ~ I discovered this album through TikTok, so it feels apt to share 🕸️
So well said! I have been thinking about this and similar themes a lot lately, especially as I try to disconnect from my phone and uhh find something offline to connect with?
What would I like or spend money or time on or be excited by if I didn’t have unfettered access to basically any and all topics that exist?! Is it a fruitless thought exercise bc I don’t live in that world. or is it activity with merit to try to define things of value (to me) (with or without the internet as a tool in my reality)?
How do I wake my brain up without stimulation from my phone (on dopamine and neurotransmitters, but also engaging myself to get started)? I don't see a world where I make a podcast/music start playing automatically or where my phone is in my bathroom, but surely there is something else....xx