Going Dim

On January 1st, I made Twitter ‘go dim’ — and though the social network was a primary component of this major change in the new year, in truth I made almost all of the internet ‘dim’ along with it.

I deleted not only Twitter, but Facebook and Snapchat and Instagram as well. I revoked notifications for, essentially, every web-based app that resides on my phone. I stopped reading news from my chosen sites, and I re-arranged my home screen (a Very Big Deal in my world) to emphasize learning and calm instead of distraction.

That last sentence, in a way, perfectly sums up this little experiment of mine, and and this is an update on how it’s going: I thought this change was temporary, but I’m growing more and more confident that it’s permanent.

Going dim was, at its essence, a fight against distraction and a fight for clarity. As someone who constantly tries to consider how tech can make us better, one of the primary, obvious conclusions is that tech will only make us worse once it controls us — and ‘control us’ it does once habits feel unbreakable. I know I’m not alone in thinking this way.

Craig Mod recently published a piece on going offline to ‘get his attention back’, saying this:

Today, I could live on Twitter all day, everyday, convincing myself I was being productive. Or, at least inducing the chemicals in the mind that make me feel like I’m being productive. Read more news. Send more replies. Start more threads. Each incoming reply activating a corresponding dopamine pop. Largely pushing nothing in the world forward.

Maybe I lost my attention because I’m weak, lonely, pathetic. Maybe everyone else has total control; they can resist all the information spun by algorithms — all the delicious dopamine hits in the form of red circles. Bing! Maybe it’s just me.

But … I want my attention back.

Over the past few months I’ve stumbled across a good deal of Twitter accounts which have gone dormant, adorned with final tweets or changed bios implying they may never come back either.

I think so many of us want our attention back, and we failed to recognize that it was gone for a long, long while.

For me, I missed that truth because Twitter has been very important to me over the last few years. It has sparked connections, updated me on parts of the world uniquely interesting to me, and even created friendships. Further, my internet routines as a whole are very much primary things in my life — the websites I check, the people I follow, the apps that I use. Yet going dim made it clear that these routines have served their purpose, and are now only being acted upon out of habit.

There was a time when I interacted with just about everyone I followed on Twitter,and they ‘interacted’ right back. That is no longer the case, and the social element of the social network seems gone, a reality that Jon Mitchell seems to have recognized as well.

One of the things that became most clear when I shut Twitter off and stopped drip-feeding myself with links, news, and communication was this: I felt lonely. That feeling was followed instantly with another thought: The thing which had been keeping me from feeling lonely was a poor replacement for true relationship.

So for that reason, I’m letting go of the social network, and in a similar sense, all social networks.

Here’s to a year or change, and a year of letting go. More on that, soon.