#34: setting boundaries around media
#34: setting boundaries around media
and a bit more consideration for our own habits and tastes
Note: I'm switching to send on weekends instead of Monday so here's your first Sunday edition of Time Spent!
In this letter:
📌 What we are up against with social media and how to design for our own habits and tastes (inspired by an essay on Japanese aesthetics).
References:
Book: In Praise of Shadows by Jun’ichiro Tanizaki
Book: The Hype Machine by Sinan Aral
The Conversation: How ‘engagement’ makes you vulnerable to manipulation and misinformation on social media
WSJ: Facebook knows Instagram is Toxic for Teen Girls, Company Documents Show
My Sweet Dumb Brain: What else is there to live for?
Good morning,
Yesterday, I started reading a wonderful little book titled, "In Praise of Shadows," an essay on Japanese aesthetics by writer Jun'ichiro Tanizaki, originally published in 1933 and then translated into English in 1977. Here is a lovely synopsis.
In a lengthy discussion, he compares the traditional and modern designs of a number of conveniences—toilets, paper, writing instruments, dishes and so forth—lamenting on what we lose in modernity, like darkness, the power to calm and sooth, physiological delight, among other things.
This loss was further aggravated by the adoption of Western inventions.
"Had we devised independently at least the more practical sorts of inventions," he writes, "this could not but have had profound influence upon the conduct of our everyday lives, and even upon government, religion, art and business."
While not the main point of the book, my favorite part so far was this:
It was not that I objected to the conveniences of modern civilization, whether electric lights or heating or toilets, but I did wonder at the time why they could not be designed with a bit more consideration for our own habits and tastes." (p. 6)
Much of my interest in the subjects of this newsletter (how we read the news and how we care for ourselves) comes from a desire to think big about my own effort to live a life that carefully considers my own habits and tastes. And in an increasingly digital world, it’s easy to lose yourself.
What happens when we don't consider our own habits and tastes
So much of what news 1 used to be was rooted in time and place.
The newspaper routine on the toilet, gathering around the TV after dinner, that weird AOL news homepage when logging onto a desktop, sitting in the library looking up a reference, gossip over coffee after church or drinks after work. Remember all that?
Now, all of the above can be done in one 10 minute session on the couch, on a tiny device. And pandemic life has made it significantly worse.
For so many of us, work, socialization, procrastination, school, self-education, activism, gaming and so forth all happens on the same screens, and by extension, the same chairs or couches.
In the physical versions of life, my whole body reacts to new information, I push back on gossip, I laugh out loud or yell at the TV. In the digital, I passively accept and potentially share without second thought.
Add to this the rewiring of our brains due to social media.
On a recent episode of Aventine's podcast The World As You'll Know It, Sinan Aral, MIT professor and author of The Hype Machine, explains our compulsive use of social media as the product of our own sociality, combined with an exponential increase in the availability of social signals, and a dopamine reward cycle. Together: it keeps us coming back to compulsively seek more hits of dopamine that represent social interaction, and is reinforced by the fact that they can show up at any given time of day. Some of us even have phantom phone buzzing experiences.
Now, on top of that, add the echo chamber effect.
In a piece titled, "How ‘engagement’ makes you vulnerable to manipulation and misinformation on social media,” Filippo Menczer, professor of informatics and computer science at Indiana University, explains that because social media applications are driven by cues like engagement (liking, commenting, sharing), rather than explicit search engine queries, we end up seeing popularity bias, and a lower overall quality of content on them.
This quickly becomes problematic because our brains are inclined to follow the crowd in order to survive. But when the crowd is too big, and not actually made up of diverse, rational actors, we become vulnerable to manipulation and misinformation. Our social desire to conform distorts our judgment.
All this got me thinking of how relevant Tanizaki's warning feels: if only our modern products could be designed with a bit more consideration for our own habits and tastes.
A great portion of the onus is on technology companies to consider well-being (or at least the impact of damage, e.g.: Facebook and teen girls) more carefully. For example, Menczer proposes a solution where platforms add friction to the social sharing process through CAPTCHA tests or fees in order to slow it down.
But many misinformation and social media experts concede that most interventions are akin to playing whack-a-mole at the moment. And personally, I don’t believe anyone can (or ever will) design for your habits and tastes better than you can.
Because no one knows you better than you.
It's for this reason that I've been turning to the world of design to better understand what questions I could be asking myself to design experiences that accommodate my preferences and well-being. A lot of this work will make it into the book, eventually. For now, here are a few things that have stayed with me along this line of inquiry.
Alternative Design Options
The intentional arrangement of information
In 2015, Melody Kramer and others came up with a fantastic list of 64 ways to think about a news homepage, which she defined as "any way for a user to first encounter content."
There were the typical ones, like:
a list of stories curated by person and arranged by topic
an email newsletter
a homepage in reverse chronological order, with the new stuff on top,
geotargeted and localized material based on someone's location
content recommended by friends in a feed
And then some fun ideas they came up with like:
a homepage that changes on an hourly basis shown through a clock
interconnected stories displayed as nodes
audio news for people waiting at busstops
science news with supporting research presented next to it
And a ton more.
Revisiting the list got me thinking that it wouldn't be so hard to arrange a few such experiences for ourselves if we wanted to. The tools of curation are all there. It would begin with giving a bit of thought to the news diet you want to build.
Setting boundaries around what you actually need to know
This week, Katie Hawkins-Gaar wrote a thoughtful piece, quoting Sally Rooney, about why, when it feels like the world is falling apart, we only worry about the seemingly small things.
She writes:
Sometimes, I ignore current events completely—opting to turn off my screens and spend time with my family instead. I’ve always felt a little sheepish about this. Shouldn’t I have more to say? Isn’t it my role as a former journalist to constantly consume the news? And why do I spend so much time writing about love and grief when there are bigger, more pressing issues to tackle?
In reality, giving ourselves permission to set boundaries around consumption is incredibly important. If we aren’t wired for social signals at scale (as above), how could we be for heavy news stories?
In the comments, Ashley Holstrom replied, saying:
My friend (currently a journalist) said her therapist straight-up asked her, "Who needs you to be well-informed about anything going on outside of your beat?" No one will know or care if she isn't up-to-date on the latest climate news or war or other disaster, keeping tabs minute by minute. So why is she poisoning herself when she doesn't have the capacity for it?
That's been a freeing thing to keep in my pocket. Because how else can we love one another if we're constantly filled up with the negativity of the world?
Cutting the poison out of your diet
And finally, as we slowly start to explore what our own habits, preferences and boundaries actually are, we can at least cut what is obviously poison out of our lives.
For example, in their fall issue, CJR published The Kill List, examples of types of content that we want discarded from political journalism all together. (Another read from the same issue that I really enjoyed: What is political writing for?)
What would be on your kill list?
Remember, no one knows you better than you.
Jihii
P.S. Time Spent is a labor of love. If you enjoyed reading this, I would appreciate if you shared it with a friend or two!
I define “news” as information that is new to you and helps you live your life, specifically to make needs-driven decisions.