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.

Back to masterlist