Online media feels detrimental to me, not for wasting my time, but for drowning out my own thought. It suppresses the kind of wandering mind that turns a string of experiences into coherent stories that feature you, stories which create a sense of autonomy, stories which create the illusion of free will.
Online entertainment occupies every unclaimed moment of our lives. We’ve been here before: hours spent on our phones and laptops used to be hours spent watching TV, listening to the radio, reading newspapers and books. It doesn’t help, though, that recommendation algorithms have made online media more addictive with advancements in machine learning and AI, boosted by large-scale collection of user data. In parallel, the media created caters more to your taste. Homo entrepreneurius creates an ever-expanding palette of online media formats and topic: from ultra-short-form video to ultra-long-form podcasts. Sports, games, memes, deep-dive explainers, there’s got to be something in there that tickles you.
Our days have a structure. We work, eat, exercise, meet people, sleep. Between those activities there is unclaimed time. Waiting for a train. Walking to the supermarket. Online media is engineered to claim that time. It prevents our brains from wandering.
It’s this wandering that allows you to construct stories about why you do what you do, why you like what you like, why you feel the way you do. It’s during this wandering that you allow yourself to take new paths, to engage in new activities. You remember something you haven’t thought about for months. You become curious about something. Ideas start connecting. You have time to notice that you’re dissatisfied with some part of your life. Is this the person I want to be? You have time to turn that into action. To start learning an instrument, question your ethics, call someone you haven’t called in a long time, change jobs, build something new with Lego, go places you’ve never been before.
Trigger: the Mark Zuckerberg profile: “A journey to the heart of history’s largest nonterritorial empire”, by Jeremy Stern from Colossus. Online media is generally assumed to be bad. Stern argues that social media is the scapegoate for a plethora of bad things: polarizing society, spreading vaccine misinformation, radicalizing individuals, enabling the incitement of violence, and contributing to teen depression and suicide. On a societal scale those debates matter. But for me personally, the element that stings most is the encroaching, addictive part.
References:
- “Rest Is Not Idleness: Implications of the Brain’s Default Mode for Human Development and Education” Immordino-Yang et al 2012. Propose that constructive internal reflection is critical for learning from past experiences and appreciating their value for future choices, allowing us to understand and manage ourselves in the social world.
- “Back to the future: Autobiographical planning and the functionality of mind-wandering”
Baird et al 2011. “The results confirm that the content of mind-wandering is predominantly future-focused, demonstrate that individuals with high working memory capacity are more likely to engage in prospective mind-wandering, and show that prospective mind-wandering frequently involves autobiographical planning. Together this evidence suggests that mind-wandering can enable prospective cognitive operations that are likely to be useful to the individual as they navigate through their daily lives.”