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The Twitter Compulsion

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“For anyone who wants to write a book,” Jemima Kiss wrote recently, “the internet is probably the greatest enemy to attention and concentrated thought, both for the writer and potential readers. It works in partnership with the mind – trained during years of internet use – not be able to concentrate on any one thing for more than 90 seconds.”

Ne’er truer words writ. The internet is a 24-hour buffet of distraction. You reach for an olive, and hours later, you’re Homer Simpson, gnawing on a plastic lobster. Tis no man, tis a remorseless eating machine.

Anytime I sit in front of a screen (and for many of us, this activity takes up most of our working day), websites, tweets, videos and articles hook my mind with lures, shiny sparkly distractions that reel you in to a sea of time-wasting. How do you balance taking in loads of information that’s relatively useful and getting work done? How can you focus on a single task when the web wants you to flick through everything? When do you stop reading articles on procrastination and actually stop procrastinating?

I’ve been shedding social media tools gradually over time. I deleted my Instagram account a good while ago. People’s instalives irritated me. I was annoying myself too, taking myself out of a moment to photograph it. That’s weird. Facebook was the first to go not long after I signed up. Facebook is a complete waste of time and energy. It compels you dismantle and curate your own identity for the approval of others. It makes you hate the identities that other people project. It makes you scoff at the embarrassing oversharing people partake in; their annoying children, their cringey photographs of their boy/girlfriend pretending they have a perfect relationship, the eye-rolling pretence at virtuousness with photos of outdoor activity alongside the equally fabricated ROCKING SOCIAL LIFE photographic documentation, the me me me status updates, the phoney outrage that greets every vague scandal or contentious news story, the bullshit “opinions”, the disingenuous articulation of friendship with in jokes and quips, the boring travel documentaries, the faux mindfulness of cliched quotes or photos of the Facebook account holder alone on a landscape mimicking contemplation, the weird archiving of one’s life, the obvious distraction that it is with people checking in (irony!) at gigs or restaurants or parties when if they’ve time to be “checking in” they’re really not “there”. Any time I do look at Facebook – which is only ever if I’m in the company of someone who is checking their profile or looking something up – I’m embarrassed for everyone on it. People’s accounts are evidence of them actually changing their identities, projecting this weird version that they have which they think is an idealised one, but in actual fact is a transparently dishonest one.

After shedding social networks and breaking bad web habits, the final frontier for me is Twitter: how to use it less compulsively. I took some time off Twitter at Christmas, and since then have gone off it a little. As a result I’m not longer thinking in tweets or compulsively checking it. Sure, I probably use it way more than most people, but by deleting the app on my phone, and not having a Twitter tab constantly open in my browser, the process of looking at Twitter is now a conscious, not an automatic one.

Here are some things that I’ve learned in my mission to use Twitter less compulsively.

- All arguments on Twitter are a waste of time. All of them. Without exception.

- By deleting your normal access to Twitter (which for me was primarily the app on my phone), you’re less likely to waste time on it.

- You gain perspective on the group think and pious mob mentality when you step away from it. You don’t have to be Charlie just to think the terrorist attacks in Paris were awful.

- Constant outrage is draining. Learn the subtle art of not giving a fuck.

- Being offline clears your brain. Creativity and ideas come from contemplation, not by being a pinball bashing against endless streams of information.

- Allotting specific and small chunks of time spent on Twitter (a check in the morning, a scan of it in the evening) just shows you how pointless spending more time than that on it really is.

- You don’t actually miss anything when you’re offline.

- Information is power. Stepping away from a constant barrage of information is liberating.


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