Every now and then I’d read someone testifying on Mastodon about how the social media platform has been great for them because it’s so much calmer, which they would often attribute to the default chronological presentation of the feed: in Mastodon, the feeds are actual timelines, not engagement-maximizing barrages of the most stimulating content on the network, as filtered by capitalist algorithms. (This may or may not be a fair description of other social media services, but this is how it’s often worded in Mastodon/Fediverse-speak.)
These testimonials run counter to my experience. While scrolling through my timeline, I’d still feel a ball of stress, unease, and tension growing inside me as I go from bite-sized post to bite-sized post, my mind flittering from topic to topic, rattled, exposed, and bombarded by a rollercoaster of evocative words and images. Marshall McLuhan, the pioneering media theorist, said that “the medium is the message”; more than two years of being on Mastodon has shown to me that defaulting to a chronological feed, implementing a well-intentioned shopping list of UI/UX differentiators, and emphasizing the lack of billionaire-owners are not enough to fundamentally alter the social medium, and its message of endless rage and infinite jest.
There are many theories and aspects as to why the experience of the internet is like this, but one that has been on my mind recently comes from Oliver Burkeman, whose book Four Thousand Weeks has an appendix titled Ten Tools for Embracing Your Finitude. Section 5, with the header Consolidate your caring, says:
Social media is a giant machine for getting you to spend your time caring about the wrong things, but for the same reason, it’s also a machine for getting you to care about too many things, even if they’re each indisputably worthwhile. We’re exposed, these days, to an unending stream of atrocities and injustice—each of which might have a legitimate claim on our time and our charitable donations, but which in aggregate are more than any one human could ever effectively address. (Worse, the logic of the attention economy obliges campaigners to present whatever crisis they’re addressing as uniquely urgent. No modern fundraising organization would dream of describing its cause as the fourth- or fifth-most important of the day.)
Once you grasp the mechanisms operating here, it becomes easier to consciously pick your battles in charity, activism, and politics: to decide that your spare time, for the next couple of years, will be spent lobbying for prison reform and helping at a local food pantry—not because fires in the Amazon or the fate of refugees don’t matter, but because you understand that to make a difference, you must focus your finite capacity for care.
This is the specific kind of stress I was feeling in my recent strolls into Mastodon world: the stress of having too much to care about. So many important events and causes and advocacies, how dare I not pay attention to each and every one of them! And the absurdity becomes apparent in this expression of that urge to care: the absurdity of trying to give more time than what we mortals have.
Embracing one’s human finitude is the core of what Burkeman is saying in his book (if it’s fair to boil down an entire book to its essence like that), and, applied to social media, this means approaching the platforms with caution and a mindfulness of one’s limited lifetime and attention, awfully insufficient for all the world’s concerns.