Discernment in the digital age
Inputs and outputs
“If you yourself are at peace, then there is at least some peace in the world.”
That quote is attributed to Thomas Merton, who lived in a monastery — a lifestyle that grows more appealing with each passing news cycle.
The purpose of living in a monastery, I suppose, is to practice an idealized form of community not possible in normal society. It’s a way to find solitude and to pray. During the Middle Ages, the monks also functioned as vital scholars, helping preserve human knowledge that might have otherwise been destroyed.
In the digital age, there is a new way to find solitude. Sometimes, when I’m on the brink of losing faith in humanity, I think about deleting my social media accounts. Deleting social media wouldn’t solve any of society’s problems, and it’s not a practical way for most people to live. But it would allow for a more solitary headspace, a more peaceful way of proceeding in the world. Maybe it would help preserve some psychic knowledge lost in the frenzy.
The analogy between monastic life and deleting social media comes from a blog post by tech philosopher L.M. Sacasas, written back in 2018 when #deletefacebook was trending for whatever reason.
I’m old enough to remember the digital rebellion of 2006 when Facebook got rid of the “wall” homepage to implement the “news feed.” The new feature marked a pivotal moment in the history of the internet.
In the short-lived era of the wall, everyone’s homepage was static. You interacted with friends by clicking on their profile page. You could write a message on someone’s wall or comment on a post, but you could only see posts by visiting a profile page.
The news feed eliminated the necessity for proactive engagement. With the news feed, the updates came to your homepage in the form of an infinite scroll. If you made a change to your profile, or wrote on a friend’s wall, the update might show up in other people’s news feeds, depending on the algorithm.
Facebook users were outraged. The news feed was creepy. It was distracting. It was an invasion of privacy. A Facebook group called “Students Against Facebook News Feed (Official Petition to Facebook)” quickly amassed 750,000 members, nearly a tenth of Facebook’s population at the time.
The rebellion was a weak effort. It wasn’t even a rebellion, more like a collective reaction to being manipulated by a tech company.
Facebook users didn’t boycott. The outrage simply fueled the new algorithm. Facebook traffic surged. The infinite scroll is now a feature of every social media platform.
This was how we first became habituated to a digital world of lords and vassals.
If it wasn’t for Twitter, I would have already become a social media hermit. I don’t look at Facebook or Instagram very often. I don’t use Snapchat or TikTok. Twitter is my guilty pleasure, even though it is now called X and it is still blocking previews for Substack links.
Recently, Elon Musk said he is considering a small monthly service fee for everyone who uses X. If this small fee were accompanied by a reform of X functionality (including the liberation of Substack links) and the removal of advertisements, it might be worth it.
Most likely the fee will not accompany any positive reforms. The reason for the proposed fee is to get rid of bots that are spamming the platform and driving advertisers away. A reminder that advertisers are the customers on social media. We are the products.
If X starts to charge a monthly fee, we might legitimately see a user rebellion, or at least the gutting of enough good content to make the user fee not worth it. X will likely continue to diminish in influence as a driver of public discourse. So be it.
The argument against deleting social media is pretty simple. Even if you hate the features of a platform and resent it for eating up so much time, you’re not going to change the platform or anyone else’s behavior by staying away. The only thing that will happen is you will lose your connections and miss out on stuff.
But missing out on “stuff” is the point of monastic life. A digital monastic would stare into the face of FOMO (fear of missing out) in order to occupy a different kind of headspace.
A digital monastic would miss out on memes, jokes, funny video clips, and all the other quirky and creative things people post online. He would not get to read instant reactions to news or instant commentary on sports games. He would not get to see his friends’ pictures posted online.
A digital monastic would also miss out on seeing millions of advertisements each day. He would miss out on getting randomly irritated upon seeing a provocatively stupid tweet. He would miss out on forming warped perceptions of people based on what they post online.
To delete social media is to slow down and spend more time discovering other things to do, other things to read.
As the newsletter industry has flourished, it’s now easier to follow topics of interest, even without social media. You can find hot takes without scrolling through an infinite feed of hot garbage. You can find writers who avoid hot takes and instead provide more thoughtful takes.
By subscribing to newsletters, or other good news publications, it is possible to regain control over informational inputs.
Here are the questions I ponder when I think about deleting social media:
When consuming an algorithmic news feed all day, what is happening to my soul? What is happening to my perception of reality? My perception of self? Would I be thinking differently about the world if I spent more time away from news feeds?
How are our wants and desires changed by online experiences?
Facebook users in 2006 might not have wanted the news feed feature, but their behaviors indicated they did want it, because they started to spend more time on Facebook.
Was this a conscious decision or a mind-hack compulsion?
How do we make contemplative decisions in an age of mind-hack compulsions?
We’re never going to rewind the clock of digital technology, and that’s fine. But we still have biological minds, and we will still benefit from the age-old practices of mindfulness, meditation, and stepping away from screens once in a while.
I’ve never had enough conviction to click ‘delete’ on my social media accounts, although sometimes I muster the discipline to take a break for a couple weeks or remove the apps from my phone. Those breaks allow for a positive shift in awareness.
The difference is that what seems important and urgent on your news feeds doesn’t always seem important once you take a break. And things you forgot were important start to seem important again.
Keep up the good work