"It's all about the morsels, man. Feed me the fucking tasty morsels...tasty morsels from groovy hubs."Over time the internet at large has decimated my attention span. The ease with which to be quickly bored by some content's length or subject matter and then--with the slightest movement of the hand and the slightest tap of the finger--choose other, different content that quenches my desire for more, new (subjectively better) content has exacerbated my tendency to become bored. Everything becomes boring faster.
Before I knew I was always bored I was hopelessly content with the tasty morsels of Twitter's timeline. Opening the app on my phone required even less effort than tapping and clicking, and browsing the timeline when bored soon meant browsing the timeline wherever phones are found: at work, in the elevator, in the bathroom, walking down the street, walking down the hall, hanging out with friends, in my spare time, in my bed, etc. etc. What could be easier and more immediately pleasurable upon waking than rolling over, grabbing my phone, opening Twitter and scrolling through the feed to consume the day's first morsels asap? It is like morsel mind breakfast in bed, but it is not wholesome like Chia Pudding, but a sugary death snack, like Sour Patch Kids Cereal.
I became bored everywhere by everything that was not the timeline. Was I bored by habit? Was I bored by life? And why was I oh-so-bored when there was oh-so-much content?
No need to avert an existential crisis, I knew the answer: life is not always thrilling. This is a fine fact. An excellent fact in fact. Thrills can become boring and before you know it, you are an adrenaline junkie. The timeline forgoes beginning, middle, and end in an attempt at the mind control that is endless 'entertainment.' It becomes easy to forget that life too eventually ends when trapped in the free-ness of the 'easy' hubs.
Twitter made me believe that it had indeed solved this unprecedented problem of 'boredom by too-much-content' by providing me with more content. But like heat my mind began to seep through the caulk of my Twitter habit. I was bored because I was consuming too much too fast. I took a break from all social media and then saw the code of The Matrix.
How can anyone be blamed for believing that 'more is better?' Look at our economy, our culture. The more that we can get for free, like media, the more informed and the better we think, we think. After all, if there is any informational limit imposed, it must be to limit ideas, and that is censorship, as unAmerican as totalitarianism. I self imposed.
Reading is the only medium that demands work (and thus why it is a declining past time). Everything else is passive absorption and can be left on in the background of a task in the foreground. Twitter found a way to make reading a passive absorption by condensing it into morsels and inserting would-be meaningful tweets besides unrelated and meaningless tweets on the timeline. Tweets are liked, retweeted and forgotten in this process. Our minds become overloaded with arrays of information. Of course there can be more substantial tweet threads (consisting of a series of cohesive, related tweets) but the time spent reading such a thread undoes Twitter's purpose of more more more more more more more
(Nobody uses Twitter uninterrupted long enough to read such a thread anyway, and if they do they are depressed or procrastinating.)
Some people think faster than others, and Twitter gives them the advantage. This is personally what turned me against Twitter, the inability to choose the frequency of appearance of some accounts on my timeline. Fast thinkers I found agreeable became a bother. I wanted space from their thoughts to think my own, without their devious input. More so, I wanted them to just please shut tf up already. You have hot takes all the time yeah, I get it, but I have limits of how much I want to hear them from you
I wanted to be bored by life like my ancestors. I wanted to escape said boredom in the substantial worlds that books built, not the simple, unsubstantial, inane and forgettable tweets that filled the never ending timeline. Being bored for the proper amounts of time was a good thing. It was like getting calluses from lifting weights. I began to appreciate longer form entertainment again--for the same reason I prefer to chew Sour Patch Kids than drink Coca-Cola--and used my mind to constructively criticize as part of a larger community.
Enter Goodreads. A GR user needs to be a reader of books longer than 200 characters to use the site well, and to appreciate the site they need to want to read--and write--responses longer than a few sentences. I recall that I used to like to read. I recall that I also used to like to think. I made the switch.
After tense (and sometimes intentionally boring) build up of plot in a novel I was rewarded with the release of action. In a different way it was much more rewarding than receiving an appalled reply from a snarky tweet I sent. I remembered that books are an intellectual art form, whereas tweets are a habit of distraction from the first second of uninterrupted boredom before the mind, by nature, begins to use itself.
Yes, there are book hoarders on GR, but the higher the stack becomes the more guilt the hoarder feels; they know the mental effort required to overcome the load is large. This is good. Seeing longer term projects through to the end is incredibly rewarding and worth the agony of their creation. Finishing a book is an accomplishment. Finishing a tweet is not.
If time permits everyone should put the social media down to read more books before they become this user on Goodreads, who finally has enough characters to say what he is feeling:
"I'm not much of a real reader in the traditional sense. I'm in a way a victim of the internet age . I say a victim because I feel I somehow suffer of short attention span. It's just so easy and tempting to jump from an article to another newspaper clip and for the past 20 years I'm finding it rather difficult reading in its entire volume a real printed book."Morsels make us weak slaves. Books are like salads. They make us big and strong. Too many food similes?
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