TFW You Fall Out of Love with “Like”
I’m putting less energy into social media and more into creating physical artifacts from my life. It’s an act of political rebellion and joy.
People mean something specific when they complain about the internet — they’re sick of the social media overwhelm, of refreshing feeds in the toilet or stealthily under dinner tables. This year, there’s even more to be sick of: fake news, ugly arguments in the comments, the incoming president’s bizarre, misspelled, inflammatory Twitter feed.
Peak social media has effectively staged a coup on my preferred means of self-expression. When I was younger I had private journals online, anonymous friends to chat about music with, and multiple different screen names (remember those?). Beyond longing for a simpler time, though, it’s that I don’t remember ever having been a person who prized arbitrary “sharing,” in the social sense, to the extent that I do now.
Recently I noticed it took great effort not to post a joke I thought of in the shower on Twitter. I should Tweet this, I thought, and then wondered why I felt the need to share it at all. If a Tweet falls in the shower and no one is around to RT, was it really that good a thought? What a strange way to live, constantly commodifying one’s own inner world.
I had been aware of this developing instinct for some time. For awhile, it felt good. I was a cyborg, a human being augmented by a machine I held in my hand, able to remember and draw upon the world’s collective knowledge in depths I could never reach with my puny brain alone. I’m one of millions and millions serving thoughts and ideas to this digital collective. Noble!
But now, everything I do offline — by hand, untraceable, untagged — feels like an act of resistance. Our whims and wisdom, our 140-character quips, and our ultrasound photos alike are increasingly profitable to the companies to which we’ve been serving them. Our previously private thoughts and traits became consumer profiles. Algorithms that study everything from our hopes to our heritage depend on personal content that we’ve volunteered to shunt us into categories. In this year’s outstanding book Weapons of Math Destruction, mathematician Cathy O’Neil elucidates a scary new reality where, unless some of these data models are fixed, we could lose opportunities or attract legal scrutiny because of who the internet thinks we are.
Excessive worries about privacy seemed luddite in the thumbs-up, heart-studded social media boom, but increasingly I feel like guarding my inner world and relationships from the internet’s all-seeing eye (at least on principle — it’s too late now to untweet and unpost). It’s one way to subvert digital surveillance, prediction, and exploitation. My teen hobby was “going online,” reading websites and joining communities. The adult me may be better served cultivating relationships offline and creating physical artifacts of my life.
The other day, visiting my family, my sister and I pulled out battered old boxes from storage and went through long-forgotten photographs — photos not loved enough to be displayed in frames in the house, but still eliciting true joy and surprise when they spilled, glossy and date-stamped, from wrinkled envelopes. My first thoughts were I forgot all about these, I’m so glad we have them. And then, None of these are online! Should I put them on Facebook? Amid the delightful nostalgia of finding old pictures, I immediately considered taking iPhone snaps of each one so I could text them to friends.
I’m from the last generation that can remember having both a pre- and post-internet youth. I’ve never liked to write and mail cards and letters; AOL Instant Messenger and email were the engines of my childhood friendships. But I also remember the stuffed, sticker-blinged envelopes sent to and from other girls from summer camp. And during an autumn 2016 that was often frightening and sad, I discovered a peaceful meditation while writing my hundred-plus wedding Thank Yous in ballpoint pen. I was startled to see the strange bruise of pen ink that would stamp itself across the heel of my palm. It was so familiar. How many ink stains must my palms have registered in childhood, before I stopped writing stories, papers, letters, by hand?
Hand-writing letters to my most intimate loved ones has brought a sense of secrecy and anticipation back to communication. The illicit thrill I get from scratching paper with pen and slipping a letter into some squat old postbox might seem strange. But it’s exciting, like an underground wire. There’s a sense of closeness and safety that comes with writing a letter that you just don’t get with yet another quickly-dashed-off, easily hacked email.
Here’s another idea I want to try in 2017: Every day, write down something good that happened on a small, brightly colored Post-it note, fold it up, and put it in a jar. At the end of the year, go through the jar and read each one as a means of reflection, and to rediscover all the moments of gratitude and good-feeling you’d forgotten. It’s a little corny. But I saw it circulating on Facebook (the irony), where I spend hours each day in the dubiously fulfilling act of processing each day’s “moments,” my own as well as my friends’. The idea that at least some of the ritual work of marking time, of crystallizing positive memories, could be offloaded back onto paper feels powerful.
I’m hardly the first to wax romantic about putting aside digital pursuits in favor of the analog. But even the idea of “digital detox” has even gone quaint; who actually has the ability to “get off the internet” when you’re always on it for work? With smartphones welded to our hands, “television” as a concept ghosting softly away, and our homes increasingly wired with artificially intelligent talking obelisks, there is no “getting off” the internet. It is everywhere.
Focusing more energy on an actual paper trail of memories quiets the nagging questions that peck away at you when you live your life online: how much do you know about the companies you’ve entrusted for years, now, with documenting your life? Are you sure, without looking it up, that you really own that content? What would happen if one of them got rid of your archive or got acquired? Are you, like most of us, increasingly and thoughtlessly relying on corporations and their clouds? Your backup drives will not forever be compatible with modern hardware. Do you diligently maintain, update, and translate your digital archive from one hard drive to the next?
When I decided not to post any of the photos my sister and I found online, ever, I felt the laciest edge of rebellion at my hem: I was withholding precious metadata from for-profit surveillance and opting out of a system that’s begun to feel too close for comfort. There is hope in remembering that we don’t always need the internet, no matter how used to it we’ve become.
