How do you do it?
How do you manage to read all those tweets, post comments on YouTube, react to Instagram stories, finish the long reads on Medium and WordPress and catch up with emails? All while having a day job, socialising with friends, managing a decent workout and being up to date with current affairs and pop-culture.
I know I can’t.
I was a very, very late adopter of social media, primarily because I felt it was meant for lesser mortals, those who indulged in gossip. The narcissist that I am, I didn’t quite care about what other people did around me. I only wanted to write and share my thoughts to as wide an audience as I could.
I sceptically joined Facebook in mid 2013. And it wasn’t till 2017 that I joined Instagram. These occasions were so significant, that I wrote blog posts to confess about these mis-adventures. The only reason I have a Twitter account (I don’t care what they call it now, but I refuse to call it by any other name) is because my employer demanded I create one. Without that coercion, I would probably not have created it in 2014.
Then there’s LinkedIn, Flickr, Pinterest, YouTube, Behance… the list is far, far too long.
Over the years, I have tried to keep up with these services in patches and failed. I wonder how other people do it. And it bothers me that I am so digitally incompetent. I am everywhere, and yet, nowhere. At any given point of time, I can keep up with only one service. Everyone else is active everywhere.
When I think about all the different services that aim to ‘connect’ us in the world, all I see is this relentless barrage of information, and how miserable it makes me feel.
One More Thing
In 2019, I tried an experiment. I called it, the “Reverse Social Media.” I wanted to stop using social media, and instead focus on creating a community. I’d send out emails to people so that we could start one-on-one conversations. Needless to say, that experiment failed. I had ended up creating yet another digital footprint that I couldn’t manage. If you’re interested, you can find the archives of this experiment on Design Tuesdays.
In these first two decades of the twenty-first century, a certain Mr. Jobs made a catchphrase his own. “One more thing…” he’d say, at the end of his keynote, and announce something new. Steve Jobs’ characteristic style of delivering keynotes even has a name: Stevenote!
A side note: To me, those words will always belong to Uncle from Jackie Chan Adventures. The series aired during a time when information wasn’t as free-flowing as it is today, and when tech was only for geeks. What use was a business presentation to a teenager? So please allow me to indulge myself with TV memories from the early 2000s.
With the newsletters, I had created Uncle’s one more thing. More recently, that one more thing is Threads, from Meta. Sure, I’ve ‘created’ the ghost account, but it holds no meaning for me. To me, it’s just another username that’s gathering virtual dust.
The Digital Cobwebs
Remember the old days when we had hard disks and had backups of folders and backups of backups? Ah, those were simpler times. Those hard disks are gathering dust in a shelf somewhere.
Our digital clutter, on the other hand, is invisible, but several times worse. This digital clutter that we’ve chosen to create haunts me. Over the past few years, I’ve lost very close loved ones. But their profiles show up in recommendation feeds on social media. I don’t want to tell these behemoth companies that those are my dead relatives. The large tech companies have no business knowing this private information. But, at the same time, I don’t want their click-hungry algorithms to be so insensitive.
In my curiosity to explore the internet, I wonder how far my own footprint has landed. Who has my email address? Which database has a username attached to me?
Worse still are the chains I’ve tied around myself. Those accounts that I do know about, I find it hard to let go. It was easy to delete my Facebook (now Meta) account over three years ago. But Twitter is giving me a hard time. Not because I use it. I don’t. But because once I delete the account, my username will be available for use by someone else. And I shudder to think someone else will take on my identity. So much for me championing reuse and recycle.
There’s so much digital waste we’ve generated. All that waste is sitting on some server. Consuming electricity. Generating heat. And consuming more electricity to cool down. Every little piece of digital information I leave unattended reeks of a hypocritical sustainability advocate.
The Way Forward
I don’t have an easy answer to this mess. In this virtual chaos we’ve created, it’s a daily struggle to decide what to keep and what to discard. Which memories to hold on to, and which to let go.
A couple of months ago, out of sheer frustration, I embarked on a virtual housekeeping project. The task looked insurmountable, but I had to begin somewhere.
So, I looked for low-hanging fruits. I located those physical hard disks. I thought to myself, if I haven’t needed it in the last ten years, I won’t need it again. First, I transferred them to my Dropbox folder, so that everything was in one place, and then I began reviewing them.
So many duplicate photographs. Old portfolio files that I was once proud of, but now find ghastly. And those legacy file formats that I can neither open, nor have had the need to edit. I began hitting the delete key.
As Dropbox later informed me, I had deleted about 15000 files in the span of a week. It was a statistic I didn’t know I needed to hear. And it was so cathartic.
This was just the tip of the iceberg. There are several more files and photographs to go through. I’ve hit pause on that activity because, as I’ve now learned, I can’t focus on one thing constantly. Plus, frustration and adrenaline can fuel such binge-deleting sprees for only so long. But I hope to pick it up in patches.
My current project is to clear up the cobwebs of my blog drafts. Several of my last few posts have indeed been 3 – 4 year old drafts (this one included!) I’m still only 10% in, but seeing some virtual dust being cleaned up is helping me mentally.
I don’t know how far I’ll get. But I’m going to try. It’s a marathon, not a sprint. And the only way to tackle it is to take it one thing at a time.
On an unrelated note, how would you like me to narrate these stories via a podcast?
Musings of an eccentric mind 