A Twitter Timeline is Like A Box of Bertie Bott’s Jelly Beans
Much of my technology conditions me to think in short, disconnected fragments rather than narratives.
Blocking out distractions has been one of the biggest challenges in my first year or so as a doctoral student. I am proud of my work-life balance, keeping dutifully to about 40 hours per week and avoiding schoolwork on the weekends, but I always feel like I could be doing a better job using those 40 hours.
There are plenty of days when I know I have been very busy, but I feel like I have little to show for it. Many have told me “this is just part of the research process,” and some have told me “this is just part of work:” there are times when you work but do not produce anything substantial, and then there are some sporadic bursts of output that you can’t really predict or control.
Sporadic output may account for some sense of inefficiency, but recently, I have been considering another potential factor. Many people have characterized and commented on the phenomenon that technology is reducing our attention span. I am particularly fond of the descriptions in Nicholas Carr’s book The Shallows and its slightly ironic shortened version, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” The central idea is that we are consuming information in smaller and smaller units, and losing the ability to pay deep attention (to books, conversations, food, news, and more).
These weekly posts largely resulted from me blocking Twitter on my devices every day until 2pm (using Freedom). My thoughts in these posts are only marginally longer and deeper than what I would share on Twitter, but I was surprised at how quickly I noticed the shift. I knew that twitter had conditioned me to expect short blurts of information, everything digestible within a few seconds, but I did not expect that spending less time on twitter would make such a noticeable difference in how I think and write.
I especially notice the difference whenever I log back on: as the timeline starts feeding me little blurts again, I can almost feel my brain as it adjusts to the bizarre style of reading. It feels like popping peanut M&Ms in my mouth. They are enjoyable, I can consume basically as many as I want, and I can even rationalize that they are good for me — that paltry bit of protein in the M&Ms and that paltry bit of education in the tweets.
But reading the twitter feed is much more bizarre and fragmented than eating peanut M&Ms. A more accurate metaphor would be a bowl of those Harry Potter Bertie Bott’s Jelly Beans with flavors like grass and cough medicine in the same container as flavors like strawberry and popcorn.
And my main point today is that this fragmentation is more of a problem than brevity. Yes, brevity can keep us shallow in thought, but the greater harm is the fragmentation of our thoughts. When our thoughts shift every 5 seconds to something totally unrelated to the previous 5 seconds, we are no longer thinking in stories.
But humans literally tell stories in order to survive, and we need to have coherent, connected thoughts in order to do so. This Atlantic piece by Judith Shulevitz mentions an idea from political philosophy, that fragmenting individuals creates the conditions for tyranny and oppression:
“Totalitarian movements are mass organizations of atomized, isolated individuals” (Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism)
I think there is an analogous effect between fragmented individuals and fragmented thoughts. When we think in these 5-second bits and nibbles (yes, nibble is a technical term), we are thinking in the way computers think, not people. Computers are made for bits, people are made for stories.
In the same way that atomized, isolated individuals threaten a healthy society, perhaps atomized, isolated thoughts threaten a healthy self.
Since I am still working on endings, and I have more work to do today, I will again conclude with a poem excerpt. Also, here is a nice piece by Katherine Miller that focuses on chronological fragmentation.
“the story of our life
becomes our life”(From Why We Tell Stories by Lisel Mueller)
