Episode 66: Losing Time in Social Feeds

Transcript

I remember getting on to Twitter in the fairly early days.
It wasn't right in the beginning, but it wasn't, it was still before, let me think.
Smartphones were out, but maybe by only a year.
This would have been like 2008-ish time frame.
I was getting on to Twitter because at the time I was doing a podcast,
and at least for that type of podcast, at that time, the world was on Twitter, right?
So if you wanted to get your podcast out there and connect with other people in that community,
you needed to get on, you needed to be on Twitter.
So I did.
I never, I had never really gotten into Facebook,
but there was something about Twitter that kind of worked for me.
I liked that it was these kind of short, digestible posts.
And back in the day, I hate saying that, but back then, the prompt on your Twitter box,
I'm trying to remember exactly what it said, but it was something along the lines of
what's on your mind or something like that.
So the whole thing had been set up to be short, digestible, and not necessarily consequential
things, right?
It was very normal on Twitter to just post some fleeting thought because you didn't need
to make a whole post out of it like one might do on LinkedIn.
It wasn't really going to live in perpetuity the same way that Facebook did.
Like, yes, if someone dug back to your feed, they could find your posts and whatever.
But people didn't really do that the same way that like the old Facebook wall was kind
of almost a sense of permanence.
So anyway, there was a lot of things about it.
It was also light.
The color scheme was like kind of bright blue.
The whole thing was very friendly and nice and kind of fun.
The other thing that was neat about it, and again, in those early days, like I probably
only had like 10 friends on Twitter or whatever, 10 followers or followed 10 or 20 people.
You know, it grew over time, obviously.
But like in the very early days, there wasn't much going on there.
And it was very much the dynamic of you could come onto Twitter every, I don't know, a couple
times a day, maybe at the most.
So the newest stuff would be at the top and you could scroll kind of down the page and
you could scroll as a combination of the volume of posts, which was fairly low.
And the fact that it was sequential, you could scroll your way until you hit wherever you
remember leaving off last time.
And then you could be finished with it.
And you'd kind of feel like, you know what?
I'm caught up with the goings on from whatever silly thoughts entered the heads of my like
10 or 20 followers and you move on with life, right?
Maybe there's some conversation to be had, but generally speaking, quote unquote, catching
up was very easy as the volume on these platforms got higher, the volume of posts and people
and thoughts and everything.
And I'm trying to remember, I think Facebook started this and then every other platform
jumped on.
But a few years in, and I don't know, I'm going to say it was 2010, 2011.
I didn't look up when this began, but they shifted from social media shifted from a sequential
timeline that just shows you new stuff on top and you scroll till you hit the old stuff
over to this algorithmic based thing.
Where now there's an algorithm, we call it an algorithm.
It's probably like a long series of many, many things and data components.
And, you know, there's probably just enormous server farms figuring out what to show you
next.
But the point is the quote unquote algorithm shows you what it believes you should be seeing
at any given moment.
And that is through presumably a combination of what's been engaged with a lot and whether
what your friends are liking and what you viewed before.
And, you know, it's gotten more and more complicated over the years, but there is some amount of
of thinking and work that now goes into deciding what you should see compared to, and, you know,
juxtaposed with a timeline.
And as I recall, and I'm not 100% sure if this is a real thing or if I just made this up in my head.
So, but as I recall, again, I seem to remember Facebook kind of doing this first, moving to
this sort of thing.
And part of their justification was, well, people have so many friends, there's so many
posts that we're going to use the algorithm to help focus and narrow, right?
They almost positioned it altruistically, where it's like, hey, you can't see it all because it
takes too long, so we're going to show you the good stuff.
That was kind of the idea.
Now, I am often in this tight spot because I am a technologist.
I always have been.
I've always been drawn to computers and the internet and the web and, you know, technology
that progresses and make, you know, reduces friction in life and does interesting things.
And, you know, I might not be much of a physical engineer, but in terms of technology as a whole,
I'm a pretty, that's always been a part of my interests, my hobbies, my profession, you
know, me.
And I'm always caught between sort of that part of me that is super interested in the
progression of technology and the other part of me that realizes increasingly many of these
technological advances, quote unquote, or changes or whatever you want to call them, are not
going in a great direction and kind of feeling almost part of the problem while also being
curious to see where it goes.
I bring this up because I, again, I wasn't a huge Facebook user or anything.
Eventually, this type of algorithm-based feed came to Twitter as well while I was, you know,
still on that.
These days, it's ubiquitous.
It's Reddit, it's LinkedIn, it's, I don't know, and I've heard tale that some of these
platforms allow, there is like a view somewhere hidden where you can look at things sequentially,
but generally speaking, most people are not viewing any of their social media in a sequential
manner.
They're viewing it based on what the company believes you either want to see or should see
or whatever.
And I wasn't a detractor on this.
When Facebook moved to this, A, I wasn't really on Facebook and didn't care.
But B, the technologist in me saw this as the next step and was curious how it would go.
In hindsight, the only people, quote unquote, that benefit from this are the platforms.
The sequential feed, as I mentioned, was easy to get in and out of.
You could hop on, catch up, feel like you knew what was going on in the world and life,
and move on.
That's not a great flow for a social media platform that's primarily trying to take your
attention and give it to advertisers or take your attention and give it to whatever.
Again, mostly advertising.
But the point is, it needs your attention to survive.
It used to be that we opted our attention into these things because of the social connections
on their side.
And that coin or that lever flipped along the way somewhere where the platforms took control
of our attention in a very real way through psychological tricks and techniques where it has addicted people
to it over time.
And the social components to it are almost secondary.
I mean, sure, there's likes and some conversations and whatever, but a lot of it these days is
literally just doom scrolling, right?
Just keeping your attention on it.
And if you had a timeline on a platform that was sequential, it would not lend itself to
doom scrolling in the same way.
And that's very much a well-known fact on the part of these platforms.
What got me thinking about all of this is loss of time.
Loss of the concept of time.
And it sort of manifests itself in at least two ways in part of this conversation.
There is the obvious way where we all know that if you are someone who engages in really
any social platform, odds are you have at some point or another spent way too long just
scrolling, scrolling, scrolling through a bunch of meaningless garbage, right?
You've just gone down that doom scroll.
It's a lot easier to do that than face whatever else it is in life that you probably should or
could be doing or you're bored or you just lose track of time or whatever, right?
So you lose time in that way.
And it's a very literal kind of thing.
But I think there's another way that we're beginning to lose time.
And I'm going to pick on LinkedIn a little bit on this one because it's just most obvious,
I think, on LinkedIn.
Well, I mean, it's a couple of things, right?
For the very little bit of social media that I bother to use, LinkedIn's about it these
days.
So I'm just a little more familiar there.
But also, this piece is kind of called out on LinkedIn.
And I think it, I don't know, it's just it exemplifies the point.
I think there's another way that we're beginning to lose time societally.
Again, if you reverse back to the sequential feed, it's very clear when something happened.
Because if you were on the thing yesterday, let's say you were on Twitter yesterday, and
then you come in today and you scroll down through 20 posts, you're pretty sure those
20 posts happened sometime between when you logged off yesterday and today.
With the algorithm-based feeds, you will get content from all sorts of time periods.
And a lot of these aren't even bothering to label anymore.
Like, it used to be you'd come in and you would say, like, recent or something as a heading.
You don't even see that anymore.
You're just getting, like, this mashup of stuff that could have occurred at any point
in time.
Now, I'm picking on LinkedIn a little bit.
I'll pick on LinkedIn a little bit on this because on their posts, and I just haven't
been on, like, Twitter in a long time or Facebook or anything.
So I don't know if this is also a thing over there.
It might be.
But it tells you, you know, when it was posted on LinkedIn still pretty obviously.
Like, at the top.
And it gives you kind of a broad time frame.
And I'll look at that sometimes, and I'll give you an example of what I mean here by,
like, we're losing time.
I'll see a post on LinkedIn from someone that's like, oh, had this great time at this
conference, really happy to meet some people.
And I'm like, oh, wow, this person's at a conference.
That's really cool.
Or just came back from a conference.
And I'll look at the heading.
It'll be, like, three weeks ago.
Like, it will have been posted three weeks ago.
And this will have been the first time that I have any recollection of seeing this particular
thing, which means that LinkedIn somewhere along the way decided that I should see
this post from three weeks ago.
Now, the problem is, or not the problem, but the observation that I made was I feel like
I'm losing connection with when things are occurring because I might not get that information
for several weeks afterwards.
Whereas, had it been sequential, I would have had a better concept.
Now, you know, someone you know or an acquaintance going to a conference, not the end of the world,
right?
Like, whatever.
Who cares?
Like, you don't see that for three weeks.
It probably makes literally no difference in your life.
But is this a good path overall?
And do people start to lose touch with the actual sequential reality that we live in?
If a good portion of what you consume could come from any point in time, even though you're only looking at it for the first time.
And it could be mixed in with things from five minutes ago and things from two weeks ago and things from yesterday and things from, you know, and an advertisement.
And when you start mashing all that together and you lose the sense of time, are we headed in a direction where we continue to disconnect from our actual reality because we don't any longer have a sense of when things are occurring unless you really bother to look for it?
I don't know.
It just, it got me thinking.
There's a lot of conversation around how we lose time in a very literal way because you lose time by doom scrolling through social media.
Fine.
That's very obvious.
But I think there's another layer, which is this layer of we're no longer experiencing the world in a sequential order.
And therefore, we are losing touch with how things have been sequenced and when they occurred and sometimes where.
So, I don't know.
Next time you're scrolling through, and again, I don't spend tons of time on a lot of these platforms, but take a look.
You know, is it obvious when something was posted?
Do you pay much attention to it when you see something?
Does it matter to you that it was from three weeks ago?
Maybe it doesn't.
But it seems to me if I, you know, if I was being shown a, it almost feels like brainwashing, right?
If I was being shown a slideshow and it's like someone showed me something from five minutes ago, six minutes ago, seven minutes ago, eight minutes ago.
And then every now and then just interwove in something from several weeks ago.
I feel like it would be very easy to manipulate that in some way where you feel like things are occurring when they haven't or at a time when they haven't or at a different time than they did.