On Quitting Facebook

I suppose, if you have followed me on this blog or my various social media accounts, you know that I have a complicated relationship with Facebook. I’m not alone in this; it feels like nearly every podcast I listen to, at least the ones populated by Serious People talking about Serious Things, has intermittent discussion of Facebook, its vicissitudes, and its costs. I think a lot of this most directly inspired by a certain queasiness that Serious People have come to feel about the role of social media in the spread of misinformation, propaganda, conspiracy theories, and lies in the wake of an election that was ugly, demoralizing, and ended disastrously. But I think, indirectly, there’s something else that’s generating all this, and that the worry about #fakenews is really just window dressing on that something else: our generalized sensation that social media is, in a word, terrible.

I’ve been thinking a lot about something that the self-help author Cal Newport calls “deep work”: the ability to focus for long periods of time on a difficult intellectual task. I’m not usually much of one for self-help books, but the thing that Newport is writing about in his latest book is so manifestly important that it resonated with me deeply. I can’t tell you all the people I know who have professed an inability to read books or write well or concentrate on their coding projects over the last few years. We all have the sense that it has something to do with social media — the constantly-pinging tornado of meaningless bullshit that is somehow always pulling at our consciousness, the little rush of adrenaline you get when some old friend from high school clicks that up-thrust thumb beneath that picture of your cat, or your baby, or the view from your window. I’ve grown increasingly aware of this over the last year or so, as the intensity and frequency of disastrous news has led me deeper into the labyrinth of media updates than I ever had been before. Now, I can’t walk to the store without pulling my phone out to see if anybody has had anything to say about my last Facebook update. And, after reading 30-50 books a year for many years, I have now completed just two in the first five months of 2017, because I’m constantly refreshing internet windows, waiting for the next flash of endorphin I get when Donald Trump sticks his foot in his mouth again. I can’t concentrate for more than twenty minutes at a time on reading. This all feels related.

I used to be very proud of my ability to do deep work, and I spent time around people who were proud of it, too. I could perform heroic tasks of academia by locking myself in my dormroom with 500 pages of reading for a day or two; I could pump out a five-page essay in a sweaty hour chained to my desk; I could write an entire novella, 50, 60 pages long, in an ecstatic weekend. This remained true until fairly recently; I still remember a weekend spent standing at my desk in Minneapolis, firing off page after page of a story about a trip I took to Nebraska with my dad, as Daft Punk pulsed through my stereo. That would have been . . . four years ago? I can’t fathom how I used to do that, let alone do it with regularity. Once bleedingly prolific, I now struggle to write more than a sentence or two without checking the internet. This is doubly true of a lot of the people I hung out with in college, who were computer programmers — a culture of deep work so pervasive it was memorialized in David Fincher’s film The Social Network, as a house full of young white and Asian guys coding all night with an almost amphetamized mania. And I’ve had conversations with these people too, in which we all lament the loss of our youthful attention spans. I don’t think this is normal. When I was a kid, it was presumed that the young were feckless and it was the adults who could buckle down and get things done. Now, as adults, none of us can do a damned thing.

I say that my relationship with Facebook is “complicated” rather than purely negative because there’s a reason beyond the purely limbic that I’m drawn to it. The life of a writer can be a lonely and isolated one, and when you live alone, it can become oppressive after a while. I have been drawn to online interaction from a young age (at least for my generation); I first got a reliable internet connection when I was a sophomore in college, and within weeks I had found my way onto a message board about baseball, whereat I argued with strangers about the merits of Ken Griffey, Jr vs Barry Bonds (on the wrong side, it turns out). By the time college was over I was a regular at Baseball Think Factory, a place where, fifteen years later, I’m still chewing over the minutiae of the sport with guys I’ve never met. I found my way a few years later to Northern Attack, a now-defunct fansite for the US version of The Office; I became so close with these people that now I count many of them among my better friends, even though I don’t think I’ve ever met any of them face-to-face. These are people I like and care about, whose jokes make me laugh and whose kids I have watched grow up — and I’ve done it almost entirely on Facebook. Over time, as the nature of social media changed and people got more comfortable sharing their real names and lives on the internet, I got to know a lot of people solely through the means of Facebook. Some of the very best conversations I’ve had about art and aesthetics and politics have been had on my friend Isaac Butler’s carefully-curated Facebook page. These are all things I would lose if I were to quit Facebook entirely.

This is as opposed to Twitter, which I have heard is where the cool kids hang out, but with which I have had almost entirely negative experiences. For many years I just couldn’t figure out how it worked — but then, again powered by my election mal de mer and its voracious need for information, I began piecing it together, following journalists and baseball writers and comedians and friends, chiming in from time to time, feeling a rush of endorphins when I got retweeted by Ira Glass. But it was also an unfiltered venue for vitriol, and the truth is that I, personally, was the source of a lot of that. I have spent thirty years honing my way with words, to the point now that I don’t know anybody (personally, anyway) who is a better pure stylist than I am. This means that when I get to insulting people on the internet, the insults come out scathing and red-hot, a pure window into my raging id. Combine that with alcohol, and you have a real recipe for toxic, quasi-anonymous communication. At one point I told somebody that my kids would be graduating from college while his were dying from heroin overdoses. It’s a cruel thing to say, and usually I would keep it inside — but Twitter, by allowing me to wander into a conversation being had in public by someone I disagreed with, and affording me the necessary alienation from the other that I couldn’t quite feel their humanity, empowered me to say it. The next morning I shut down my account, and I’ve never really been tempted to go back. Twitter = bad. Facebook = complicated.

The idea behind using real names on Facebook was, I think, an attempt to hold users accountable and make sure we didn’t get into these kinds of deracinating verbal battles, which have been a staple of online interaction going back to the dawn of internet-time. (I wonder sometimes if the first message on the old ARPAnet wasn’t JCR Licklider calling Douglas Englebert a twat.) A noble idea, but the problem with communicating via these silent screens isn’t that we don’t know one another’s names — it’s that we don’t know one another’s voices, and faces, and bodies, and states of mind. Especially when the discussion runs red-hot with politics, it is possible to completely lose track of another person’s humanity, and take the whole conversation down in flames. Hell, I have family members, sisters to one another, who have fallen out in meatspace because of flame wars they had on Facebook about (naturally) Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. That’s nothing to do with #fakenews — the accusations of perfidy and propaganda were merely weapons in a war fought between alienated humans. It’s not totally dissimilar to asking a young army sergeant to drop bombs on foreigners from the convenience of a computer screen somewhere in Nevada.

Yesterday morning the novelist Marlon James wrote a post that “went viral on the internet” (to use the preposterous jargon of Facebook’s AI news aggregator) that was, mostly, about the ways in which the fractious left has continued to crack along lines of identity and race. You should read it; James is absolutely right about that part, and the fact that I sort of feel like I (a white male liberal with an expensive and baroque education) am not allowed to make the point unless I am parroting someone like James (a black Jamaican-American liberal who now provides such expensive and baroque education and what one can only assume is a hefty salary at Macalester College) is proof of his argument. But that aside, the thing he says at the top — the thing that neither he nor I dreamed up first, but which bears repeating — is what obtains here:

[T]his weekend, more than any other, I came to realize that of its many flaws, Facebook’s worst was that it is an inept medium for disagreement, a shitty one for argument, a hostile one for any kind of confrontation, and yet a frightfully efficient way to instantly end friendships and alliances. This might be because liberals give themselves credit for something they actually suck at, which is to have a constructive argument.

I realize that this post has become jumbled, that it’s come to be about two related but different things — Facebook’s intrusion on my cognitive processes, and the alienating aspects of social media — but that’s because they’re about my sort of ambient unease with the whole thing. I really do enjoy Facebook, the way it has got me back in touch with old friends I probably would never have seen again, the way it lets me be involved in the lives of far-flung people, and the way it gives me a venue for showing off. But I really, really hate it, too. I hate what it’s done to my attention span and work habits; I hate how it allows me to access and display my worst qualities. I hate most of all that it’s so hard to step away from. After the election, blaming Facebook for its gross abdication of responsibility as a media company, I tried to quit. I think I lasted about ten days. About a year ago, I managed a month — a blissful month of reading books and working on my novel and playing guitar — before getting sucked back in. So this post is entitled “On Quitting Facebook”, but it’s not really about that, because I’ve come to believe that quitting Facebook altogether will probably be almost as hard, and equally as fitful, as quitting drinking has been. Right now I’m struggling with one addiction. Maybe best not to add another on top.

That said, I think I’m about ready for my annual social media rage-quit. I’m moving into research mode for my second book now, and I have to familiarize myself with a lot of information that is both historical and analog in nature — meaning, the less time I spend dicking around on the internet, the better. I’m still thinking about when it’s going to happen. Perhaps when I move to Bend. I’m not going to pretend I’ll be gone forever, of course; but I am shooting to take a month or two off over the summer and remember what it’s like to get back into the habit of doing deep work. Here’s hoping.