284 stories. I saved 284 stories in the last couple of months of my online existence. And that is just on Facebook. Is it a lot, is it too much? I do not know, I only know that I have read 15 something fewer books than what I had planned to read, took 1000 fewer photos and approximately 10 fewer walks in the park. Instead, I have saved (and read/viewed) 209 links, 79 videos, 4 photos, 1 movie.
What I learned? A lot. What I’ve missed? A lot. I’ll take them one by one.
The Good: Memory On Save
Through social media (Facebook, blogs and Youtube) I have access to almost any type of information in whatever form I want to consume it. E-learning was never easier — I can read and learn from some of the worlds masterminds, listen to teachers from Stanford explain about mechanics, watch artists from the US perform poems on gender equality and identity or graffiti artists from Turkey paint Arabic verses on buildings around the world. It’s as if I have access to a collective memory, neatly stocked in pieces of information I can not only consume, but index, save, annotate, modify, reuse and save in this new form I give it.
I also get to choose whom I read and let influence me.
There was one theory I particularly resented in college — agenda setting. A millennial by birth and a child of the Revolution by ego, I found the idea outrageous: clearly, a person with access to all this information and credible key opinion leaders could figure out for himself what the truth was. And I stand by this: in this day and interconnected age you are the one responsible for your own beliefs, for how you research and validate your truth.
But I did find out I was wrong: there seldom is one truth out there that people live and act by. And sometimes your memories on one topic, your knowledge about it are nothing but just one piece of the puzzle. Getting stuck in your own curated memory of a reality could prove just as ineffective as letting others (media, governments, internet trolls) decide the public agenda.
The Bad: Life On Hold
With time I understood that the problem born out of this is that you create your own bubble and live inside it. You put other people’s lives and realities on hold until you somehow end up letting someone different into your feed or your life. And letting someone different is hard, it is much easier to push them away, dismiss them as uninformed or, even worse, stupid.
During the 2014 elections in Romania I burst my own bubble: I left the comfortable social media feed I had customized for myself and reached out to older members of my family and asked them what their thoughts on the presidential election were. I watched the most popular TV talk show (a left-wing partisan I used to despise) to try and make sense of how other people’s lives and truths sounded like, what their news feed was like and why they created/accepted it as such. And most of the times I found out that it was not due to lack of information or stupidity that they chose to customize their news input that way, but rather something I also did — comfort. Comfort in knowing that the information they consumed would not confront any of their previous beliefs or interests, comfort in the validation you find in hearing a public figure/a person you admire stand by your beliefs, your recollection of the truth.
The Ugly: Memory Becomes Scarce, Life Is Limited
What I’ve learned up until now from being almost addicted to online and what’s next:
- My short and long term memory are affected
I almost always have to save a link, write about an experience, scribble to do lists to remember everything from a 3 item grocery list to the list of dreams I want to achieve by the time I’m thirty. I find it hard to concentrate on long form writing and forget I read books I didn’t review in writing. And unfortunately due to my job (I work in online advertising) most of the times my browser tabs include social media feeds that blink, get notifications, new posts etc.
What’s next: I am under intensive self applied treatment. I try to avoid Facebook and YouTube all-together when I’m working or reading (not fully there yet, but I will be), I put my phone on silent and forget it in another room when reading real live books or chatting with family members who are not on Facebook/Twitter/Instagram. I’ve started a calligraphy project to help me better concentrate on poems I love and find meaning in and, yes, I’ve started writing again. Somehow I want o create my own memory from scratch, aside from tapping into the online collective memory.
- My (online) life will be put on hold from time to time
As I already mentioned this collective online memory can be overwhelming. There’s literally an infinity of resources to help you find your way in many aspects of your life: career, hobbies, relationships.
But sometimes you just have to put those on hold, power off and find inspiration somewhere else. I’ve learned more about leadership during 3 classes of tango than in 2 Business Insider articles and 3 Guy Vaynerchuk videos combined.
All in all, I have a long way to go. Yes, this interconnected online world gives me the power to turn agenda-setting theory on its head, it allows me access to information and people, but it also limits me to a bubble I create for myself. I think I will use it wisely but also pause it a little bit more often.
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