Social media

My name‿ is‿ Alex. I have used social media│ since the age‿ of fifteen,│ and‿ I now regard‿ it‿ as‿ a curatorial practice rather than‿ a means‿ of communication,│ a distinction the platforms have‿ a commercial‿ interest‿ in‿ obscuring.

What they are‿ engineered for‿ is‿ engagement,│ which‿ in practice means sustaining my scrolling‿ an(d) my mil(d) dissatisfaction. My feed presents the bes(t) ten minutes‿ of‿ everybody's week,│ an(d) comparison follows‿ inevitably. The validation conferred by a notification‿ is‿ a genuine reward,│ and‿ an‿ algorithmic feed dispenses‿ it far more‿ efficiently than‿ a friendship can,│ which‿ is why the pattern‿ is so resistan(t) to interruption. What‿ alarmed me was noticing│ that my attention span had contracted‿ and│ that I^{thad I} could no longer read for‿ an‿ hour without reaching for the telephone.

What‿ assisted was not deletion but renegotiation. I disabled notifications,│ unfollowed twenty^twen-dy accounts,│ restricted my privacy settings,│ an(d) now use these platforms for some forty^for-dy minutes daily. Influencers‿ are not the difficulty,│ nor‿ is the technology as such. The difficulty is‿ a business model that requires‿ attention to be harvested,│ and‿ a system profiting from polarisation has no incentive whatever to reform‿ itself. Misinformation‿ is‿ a symptom;│ the incentive‿ is the mechanism,│ and‿ until that‿ is‿ addressed the rest‿ is decoration.