robertch – Fixing Social Media

I appreciated this assignment because it encouraged me to reflect on how I recently redefined the applications that I use in spare time, and that I unknowingly drift towards as I go throughout my day. For this past week, I have actively switched my “default” app from Messenger and then Gmail to the New York Times App and then the Books app. While I did not track my time spent on these apps, it was easy to find through the Screen Time feature on iOS. In order to make the data collection concise yet meaningful when Screen Time exists, I recorded which applications or websites were entry points.

My data collection process was simple, I recorded the approximate time spent on media found through a variety of these initial leads on media, and captured my data in a graphic, below. The graphic was generated by converting the time spent on each entry point’s media sources into a transparency percentage according to a logarithmic scale, and modified the icon for that app or site. Perlin noise was added to create a noise floor, a point where features of images would become invisible. In order to make it so that each logo was visible in proportion to the amount of time I spent through it, I generated a cloud of 600,000 dots (one dot for every second of this past week), in order to have an equal baseline for visibility of each of the logos. This cloud of media consumption, I’ll call “Cloud of Media”.

While not all of the applications are visible, from right to left and moving down, there are Google Docs, Firefox, Youtube, New York Times, Apple News, Google Chrome, Reddit, Apple Books, Safari, Spotify, Dropbox, Simple Radio, Twitter, and a game title.

The image format conflicts with WordPress due to how large and difficult to compress it is, so the Cloud of Media can be found at: https://www.dropbox.com/s/u0w0011joqfiqnm/cloud_of_media.png?dl=0

This is my third time doing a technology / media / internet fast, and I learn something new each time. This time, I was surprised by how much more prepared I had to be for events and things that I had during my day. For example, instead of budgeting my time within a 5 minute window, I had to board the T with more like a 15-minute window, in order to ensure that I arrived at my event on time, and based on how I had to base my trip on a rough guess of the transit time.

One new change in my life with regard to technology has been in my use of an app for managing my credit cards. My instinct of pulling out my phone to pay for a meal was replaced with an awkward pause and a revert to my old way. It took so long to pull out my card, it felt like it had sealed itself into the leather of my wallet. Many of my friends go out and about without a wallet, but I’m not that extreme yet – I like most enthusiasts of this technology, am waiting for !00% adoption in the merchants that I would shop from, but then again, so are the merchants with customers like me, in a chicken-egg problem. Under China’s top-down technology philosophy, changes like this could happen practically overnight. But I prefer autonomy, late adoption, and inconsistency over an oppressive philosophy. I would rather just carry my wallet, but will that limit my growth as an early adopter?

Another point that stood out a lot to me is in my solutions to boredom. I look at my phone too many times, and for way too long, throughout the day. I brought a magazine with me to read, but it did not fill the same type of engagement that I was looking for. I’m not entirely sure what that form of engagement actually is, but it involves chasing after the most interesting article, email, or text that I have or can find through a notification. It feels more like I am burying myself in my phone, than actually trying to find something. What am I trying to escape from?

I think I have an idea, because when I looked up from my magazine, I found that others who were on their phones were similarly disengaged with others around them. We share the same physical space, but we do not interact like we are so physically close. In general, I’m not suggesting that we revert to some Draconian policy that restricts mobile data access in public transit in order to make people socialize more, but that it could be useful to reframe the way we think about public space in a way that supports this opportunity for connecting. My main concern is that this social disconnect has more to do with social distaste, instead of the technology that we bury ourselves in in order to escape the discomfort of being present with those around us.

Overall, I really enjoyed this media fast, and learned a lot about myself, and my own attitudes related to neo-Luddite ideas, social discomfort, and the escapism that comes from social media.