TTFeb: Balancing time on the internet

[superborb]

cortue prompted: Thoughts about "balancing" the amount of time spent on the internet during isolation

tl;dr, I don't tend to think of time on the internet as differently allocable than other time.

I think there are obviously modes of human interaction that are not well replicable on the internet: casual interactions tend to be a lot more superficial without body language, and it's much more difficult to have the large group splitting into smaller conversations experience with any of the existing platforms. While you might split off a thread or get distracted with another platform, this drops any other conversations in an opaque way.

Meanwhile, there are modes of interaction that are better done on the internet: updating all your friends at once, staying in contact with acquaintances you don't see regularly, and of course, meeting people who you normally wouldn't have met (e.g. in fandom).

All of those kinds of socializations and like, chatting with friends in general, I don't really feel bad about "wasting time on," because I definitely by default spend less time on it than would be optimal for my socialization meter? I'm sure this is not true for everyone, but I am (and have always been) less inclined to reach out and maintain friendships that I /know/ I would enjoy and be happy doing. So if socializing on the internet lowers that barrier, I'm all for it.

I also heavily curate my various social media and will unfollow people readily if it doesn't seem like following through that platform feels social, which is, of course, not a judgment on anyone's use of a platform for their own needs. If a person is more non-socialization informational stuff, I prefer to subscribe through my RSS reader, to better separate those streams. (And obviously all of that is fuzzy choices.)

In non-social uses of the internet, the aforementioned RSS reader is where I get most of my news. It turns out, interesting and informative feeds are so difficult to find that I rarely worry I spend too much time there. It helps that it's easy to flick through after reading a title if it's not a subject I care about at that moment, and that it's super asynchronous and can wait until I have time.

There is /one/ part of the internet I know I'm in trouble when I start lapsing into, and I try to avoid, which can be summed up as "low quality, I just want to read anything." But it's not exactly something I want to balance, as it's usually a sign I'm depressed. This is if I'm reading fics on AO3 that I don't even find compelling, but are words I can stuff into my eyeballs, or if I've fallen into the depths of YCombinator Hacker News or Reddit. I guess other people doomscroll, but I don't have social media feeds that are deep enough for me to do that? At the beginning of isolation, I was totally in that mode for MDZS fics; I was reassuring bf that this was total normal behavior for me, but it... was normal /depression/ behavior. Anyway, that's time badly spent.

So I suppose it's not really that I think all time spent on the internet doesn't need balancing, but that I want to spend my time on things that are enriching, and if I'm filling those needs on or off the internet, it doesn't matter which? Not all needs can be filled on the internet, but for example, I'm just as happy to read books on the internet as off.

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Comments

[chestnut_pod]

I like your distinctions between behaviors easier on the Internet and behaviors easier off the Internet!

[superborb]

The internet is good for some things!!

[sophia_sol]

Yes, I love your framing of it, that it's whether the time spent is enriching that matters, not where it takes place! I fully agree with that as it plays out in my own life too

[superborb]

Yeah!!! And though I know there are people for whom the extra socialization of the internet is not enriching... that's not me haha.

[china_shop]

*leaves kudos* :-)

[superborb]

<3!

[macey]

Oh boy, that last one - the trash-reading - I really feel that. Question: d'you have any approaches / tactics / things that you do, when you notice you're falling into that pattern? I tend to find I'm not actually able to focus enough to move to non-trash reading, or figure out Other Activites...

[superborb]

I don't think I even recognized it was a thing I was doing until last year!! I think forcing myself to go on Walks Outside really helped; back in grad school, I think it was rock climbing that did it. I don't think it's about the exercise as much as 'alternative thing to focus brain on'???

[macey]

yeah spotting it is half the battle... hmm. sometimes I feel like putting on headphones and cleaning for the length of an album helps? maybe the problem right now tho is that, while I WAS going out running several times a week, right now I'm under 'no exercise' interdict 'til my new tattoo heals =/ maybe I should try walks tho

[superborb]

Yeah, walks seem to work okay for me, though perhaps not as effectively. I guess the outside helps, since cleaning doesn't work for me? Though sometimes I think tidying / organizing also works, bc that engages the brain a little more?

[cortue]

Really well put! I asked that question before I'd made significant inroads in using dreamwidth and I feel like I can understand your points much better in terms of feeds feeling social now that I have.

[superborb]

I think my view of what social media should be has been heavily shaped by LJ, in ways that are sometimes not obvious to myself...

[cortue]

I feel like you may have said this somewhere before but I forget, sorry. I'm curious what your social media trajectory from livejournal was. Did you switch to dreamwidth once the livejournal shakeups happen? And then also twitter in there somewhere? I can see how there would be a throughline of more social internet that way.

[superborb]

Yeah, I didn't manage to switch to tumblr! And then when I came back to fandom a yearish ago, I tried tumblr and twitter, and ...still don't really understand tumblr lol.

[cortue]

Yeah I feel like I managed to carve out a space on tumblr that was more social than the average, but it's certainly going against the current. It's funny that I'm reading this comment when I just saw a post that I feel like really encapsulates the bizarre shitpost humor that I feel like I only see on tumblr, and is one of the reasons that I enjoy still going back there: https://cortue.tumblr.com/post/677490455108321280/every-word-that-starts-with-an-n-should-have-a. But I'm the sort of person that loves a stupid joke.

[superborb]

Ahhh, I see. I guess once-in-a-while that kind of humor on twitter or wherever is funny, but it has to be a small percentage or it's overwhelming to me!

[cortue]

Oh yes, I realize that wasn't clear. I feel like tumblr has the same grab bag mix of content that a lot social media sites (I feel like no matter which site I'm using, I'm looking at a screen cap or a link from another social media site - except dreamwidth I guess), but the one thing that it has that I really like is the collaborative nature of posts that can go all these random directions you don't expect. So the one above was a dumb joke in a style that I felt was very tumblr, but then there was another one that went on tangents about how to diagnose an unexpected microbe or parasite that sci-fi astronauts find out Mars.

It's such an interesting split for me, because I find twitter impenetrable and I've tried multiple times! I think the little bits of text that can infinitely fracture into different threads and never seem to be in an order I understand unless I've been on twitter all day just overwhelm me.

[superborb]

Oh I see, that does make sense! I guess it seems more conversation like? But then the conversation gets elevated to the 'top level post'.

LOL I'd say the same thing about tumblr... I don't understand those fractal conversations or how to follow them and they all just appear randomly in the middle of a conversation on my dash??? But tbh, it's the image heavy nature of it that makes it difficult to follow, the conversation confusion is a secondary complaint. (I just sort my twitter by 'latest', which puts it chronological? Twitter does go through phases of 'broke the threading capability whoops' which /is/ annoying when broken because it starts giving you middle bits of conversations.)

[cortue]

Exactly. And the thing is that for some popular old posts that have been going around, you might come across one splinter of it one day and then a year later see it again with a whole different thread of the conversation that's happened. It's interesting to see how different brains react to different chaos! I tend to like the images because I'm often looking at tumblr when I need to give my brain a break but am struggling to do nothing, so looking at gifs from a show someone I'm following is very into right now can be like an active nothing.

[superborb]

I think I just am not very visually inclined! It takes a lot for me to enjoy an image, and usually requires me to ~contemplate~ it for a while.