Good morning, Hank. It's Tuesday.
So I was talking to a friend at VidCon,
actually I wasn't talking to him, I was scrolling
through my Twitter feed trying to make
sure that everyone was having a good
time at VidCon. You know I'm looking to
see if there were any problems and my
friend said "You seem stressed" and
I said "Twitter" which is both the name of a
social network and my personal word for
that kind of buzzing misery that the
social internet lately fills me with.
I call this strange brew of outrage and
worry and exhaustion and not being able
to look away Twittering but presumably
you can get the same unpleasant and yet
still somehow desirable feeling from
other social media outlets. And also
possibly elsewhere but I get it mostly
from Twitter.  By the way I hope you don't
get this feeling and that the internet
brings you nothing but joy and
fulfillment. I think Twitter and Facebook
and etc. are useful and important and in
pockets quite beautiful and obviously
I've benefited from them a lot
but i'm just going to level with you and
acknowledge that the majority of time
these days my general feeling when on
the social internet is like ahhhh.
Right so anyway, I explained this to my friend and
he said "You should make your phone into
a dumb phone" and I said "What?" and then he
explained that among the many things you
can do with a smartphone is turn it
into a device that closely resembles a
cell phone from 2005, except with a much
better camera. This had literally never
occurred to me and about a month later
after a particularly egregious episode
of Twittering I did it. My phone no
longer has Twitter or Facebook or E-mail
or Reddit. I even broke my son's heart by
deleting Pokemon-Go. I do still have an
internet browser, which allows me to fall
down various rabbit holes if I'm highly
motivated, but in general I just use my
phone for calls and texting and pictures.
Well also i've got my Delta app so i can
check in to flights and Yelp and Google
Maps and of course the Chipotle app and
this app that tells me whether there are
soccer games on TV right now.  It's not
really that dumb of a phone, but the
point is I have no way of Twittering
there's just one problem with my dumb
phone, which is that it hasn't worked.
Like I suppose in the last seven months
my background level of stress has
decreased somewhat, but mostly I just
spend more time with my computer.
This is partly because I feel some vague but
nagging obligation to be informed about
the events of the day.
Although in the end I'm not convinced that Twittering
actually makes me better informed like I
know quite a lot about Donald Trump's
handshakes with foreign leaders, but I
don't know much about South Korea's
ousted President or the ongoing
corruption scandals in Brazil or even
the US Federal Reserve's monetary policy.
Plus, I feel like when I'm inside the
feed I kind of become a person I dislike.
Like I find myself skimming instead of
engaging and valuing cleverness over
compassion and also clicking on
clickbait which just creates a world
with more clickbait.  And sometimes
they'll be like sorry my actual real
life family but someone is wrong about
something on the internet and I need to
explain to them exactly why they are wrong.
God help me I've even retweeted
fake news. Point being it is time for a
drastic intervention. So in the last
couple of weeks I've decided to scale
way back on the social internet and put
myself on an information diet.
Rather than trying to drink from the firehose
of Twitter i'm spending an hour or two
each morning reading these mostly The
Economist the New York Times The Wall
Street Journal and my hometown
Indianapolis Star. How do I explain
newspapers and magazines to young people?
Basically it's like a very carefully
curated internet that someone prints on
paper and then mails to your house. It's
an extremely inefficient process and too
expensive, but I am desperate for a
change.  So is it working?  Well I'll echo
many a clickbait science headline and
say that early results are positive but
it's too soon to know for sure.
Nerdfighters, I'm curious if you're
having similar problems with the social
internet or if my experience is more of
an outlier.  Let me know in the comments
below on that subject i will say that
Youtube still feels different to me from
the rest of the Internet.  In general I
just find YouTube less stressful, but
that might be because I get to live in
this relatively friendly and peaceful
corner of it so thank you for that. Hank,
I'll see you on Friday.
