master + servant: why i’m deleting social media. For now.

I have a love hate relationship with technology.  It is both my nimble little servant, and a coercive, omnipresent master.  So this summer I am making it my mission to take back control.  I’m logging off from social media until September.  I’m taking a month-long, digital detox.  A techno-sabbatical.  An iFast.

I recently discovered I’m a ‘cusper’ or a ‘Xennial’ if you prefer.  Not quite Generation X, not quite Millennial; I’m part of a small sub-generation of people born in the latter half of the 1970s and the very early 1980s who have the best, or worst, of both worlds.  We’re the people who enjoyed our childhoods off-line, but are now fully logged on as adults. We’re old enough to remember the excitement of the school’s only BBC computer being wheeled into the classroom.  We taped the charts, wrote letters, and asked people out in person. Our university lives were lived away from the gaze of social media and we experienced boredom when there was nothing on TV.

And whilst the internet was spreading fast during my time at university, my first rung on the career ladder was not dominated by digital.  The first press release I sent out was via fax and I remember switching on Ceefax to check for coverage.

The tipping point came in the late 2000s.  Facebook became widely available in 2006 and was quickly followed by Twitter.  The iPhone was launched in 2007 leading to the proliferation of the smartphone, and the financial crash of 2008 paved the way for the uncertain world we know today.

I’m not a luddite.  In the innovation adoption lifecycle – I am probably among the 13.5% of ‘early adopters’.  But I can remember a time before technology became all-consuming and I cannot help but feel that if in 2008 my iPhone was my servant, in 2018 the roles have been firmly reversed.

Being constantly switched on not only drains your phone’s battery – it drains your own battery. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi argues that enjoyment in life can only come when we are focused, conscious, and mindful of what we are doing; a concept he describes as flow. We can only achieve flow during periods of time when our concentration is unbroken.  Anything that interrupts our concentration, however brief, affects our flow.  Professor Tim Wu, of Columbia University thinks older people may be better able to tackle serious thinking, complex tasks and problem solving because of their relative freedom from smartphones.

Our smartphones are designed to be intentionally addictive, and the tech industry constantly strives to make apps ‘stickier’.  There’s an increasing body of evidence showing that social media notifications effect the levels of dopamine, the pleasure signal chemical, in our brains. This continual quest for the next dopamine hit is re-wiring our brains.

Writing for the Bank of England’s policy blog BankUnderground, Dan Nixon argues that this smartphone induced ‘crisis of attention’ is hurting our individual productivity and potentially the economy at large.  I agree.  And whilst I think policy-makers are right to hold large social media firms to account on data, governments are monumentally failing to address the public health and economic consequences of this ‘crisis of attention’.

As someone who has had to work hard on focus and concentration, anything that distracts me, however minor, is enough to sound my alarm bells.

I recently discovered the ‘mute phrase’ function on Twitter (Trump and Brexit were the first two on the list), and while my Twittersphere is now rosier than before, it’s still a pretty grim place.  Twitter is no longer the informed forum of debate or source of news that it once was. And like a social smoker who only lights up when they drink, I’ll often shut Twitter down only to open Instragram up.

So I’m stepping back for a month at least. Accounts have all been deleted, de-activated or mothballed.

It’s time master technology once again.