Time Itself is Changing

I've been reading about how social media is warping time. It is not only changing the way we experience time, it's also changing our awareness of time and our memory of it. This article by Gurwinder is worth reading in its entirely.

A few quotes that stand out:

1. Time is speeding up

"Theoretically, a social media feed should heighten awareness and memory, and dilate time, because it selects for content that’s exciting, outrageous, and scary. And yet we seldom remember such content. The reason for this discrepancy is simple: when every post is alarming, your brain quickly becomes desensitised, and starts to interpret alarming content as routine. And routine, being passive and therefore immemorable, speeds up time."

In other words, our days are getting shorter, with less and less output, which impacts our self-esteem.

2. Memory is becoming fragmented.

Think of memory as coding a sequence of events in the form of before, during and after. Social media scrambles that like an etch-a-sketch.

"It’s a chronological maze. It has no beginning, middle, or end, and each post is unrelated to the next, so that scrolling is like trying to read a book in a windstorm, the pages constantly flapping, abruptly switching the current scene with an unrelated one, so you can never connect the dots into a coherent and memorable narrative."

So you forget the time (it becomes a non-experience), and you forget the content as well - Try spending 30 minutes on social media and see how much of it you can recall.

3. The present moment becomes more and more troubling.

"The result of having your day punctuated by these notifications is that your attention is constantly intercutting between the real world and the virtual one, so that your life becomes a book in a windstorm just like your feed. This creates problems of its own. Continually dividing your attention between two worlds means you can never fully settle in either, creating constant anxiety and stress."

There are fascinating YouTube videos of people changing out their smart phones for "Dumb Phones," which are basically the old flip phones. To me that's extreme (how do they text anyone?).

I've found it the most helpful to:

1. Kill all phone notifications you can (no social media, news, etc).
2. Take the social media apps off your phone (Only view them on the computer
3. Use feed-blocking Chrome extensions to only see notifications and messages (no rabbit holes).

I've outlined the details of how to do it here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-get-your-time-energy-focus-back-robert-richman-ecyyc/

But don't believe me. Try it for yourself! Because when we lose track of our time, we lose our memory. And when memory goes, so does our identity. We forget who we are, what we're doing and why we care.