With attention being demanded on a near-constant basis, it’s only natural to want to be noticed too. More and more effort is required to get the same amount of attention. Spend an hour on social media, or spend an hour chatting with a good friend. Which one leads to greater satisfaction? Which one leads to greater exploration of ideas, a good book to read, new perspectives to explore? Which one inspires curiosity to learn more?

I miss the golden age of the hashtag. It was a clever way to share an idea, find common ground, or come up with odd jokes. Somewhere along the way, it started to become a tool for getting people fired.

I miss how the ideas wanted to find connection, rather than simply be noticed.

Seth Godin, writing on the very topic I’ve been mulling over all week:

We’re hooked into something volatile, easily measured and emotional. We overdo our response to news, good or bad, and let it distract us from the long-term job of living a useful life.

…

It'll be volatile with or without your help. Better to set it aside and get back to the real work of making a difference instead.

Social media thrives on volatility. Quick bytes of information that feed more quick bytes of information. And then on to the next thing.

We can go from horrified, to thrilled, to terrified, to sad, all in the span of seconds. It’s no wonder we’re exhausted. The quick hits of emotion seem to make us want to seek out other hits of emotion. It’s a vicious cycle.

Stepping away, taking a chance to breathe and digest, seems to be the only way to break the cycle. It’s a cycle that desperately needs to be broken.

I’m filled with big ideas. There’s big ideas for what I want to accomplish with my work. Big ideas for where I might like to travel. Big ideas for a project I want to complete.

When it comes to envisioning what this all looks like, I’m a pro. I can visualize myself doing it, seeing it, accomplishing it. What I’m less good at is getting started, and staying started.

Focus is easily lost. The day gets away from me. I lose the thread, and the next day can’t find it, or even remember quite what it looks like. Where was I when I lost sight of it? What does that feel like again?

I wonder if I took just an inch, and built from there, if I could find my way back.

As I drifted away from writing, the longer I waited to try again, the more daunting it felt. I forgot how, I would think to myself. I don’t remember what it was like to write, and I started to become afraid of putting words out there.

I thought a lot about it, about how it might look, and how I might organize it. Overwhelm would creep in. Should I say something about being gone? Should I revise old posts and start fresh? Should I abandon it and move on? Should I organize all those lingering tags?

In the thick of the questions, no writing was done. Thinking about writing isn’t writing. Trying to edit an old blog is like erasing a past that helped you find your way to the present. It’s okay to get lost. It’s okay to let those young writings stay young. And maybe organization only needs to go so far. The enjoyment always came from the writing, so maybe just do that again.

Maybe the words will come back if you start writing them.

In the early days of Tumblr and Twitter, I remember how much fun we had posting a photo and simply adding “Current status.” as the caption. “Here’s what I’m doing right now” was a novel concept, and it was fun to play with that. It was especially fun when we would later have “Tweet-ups” and then post photos with the same caption showing all of us from the Internet converging in one place.

I’m certainly not opposed to this concept, but I realize after a while that the novelty wore off. As social media went in more consuming directions, it became less exciting, and after a time it became less interesting.

Having been back here with slightly more frequency this past week, after stopping in once or twice a year (the beginning and the end, usually) for the past several years, I’ve realized what has been missing. This place right here was never about what I was doing, it was about what I was thinking. A story told was only interesting in light of what I took away from it. Writing was the means by which I was able to make sense of my world.

Quick snippets and snapshots are fine, but it’s the thought behind them, and the conversations surrounding them, that are interesting. You can’t share those in real-time, but if you take the time to think about it and reflect on it later, I’ll be happy to listen.

The more opportunities we have to share, the more fractured we seem to become. Follow me on Twitter and Instagram. Friend me on facebook. Follow my stories on Snapchat. That’s four accounts. Four silos into which I can put photos, videos, thoughts, out into the world. That’s just the tip of the iceberg.

For the sake of convenience, there’s a way to cross-post the same thing to each service. This means if I follow you on more than one of those, I get to see the same thing over and over. That is, if each respective algorithm decides that I should.

I’ve reached a point of saturation where I can’t keep up with it all, and it’s exhausting just thinking about it. I don’t feel more engaged or connected, I don’t feel like my friendships are deeper for it, and I don’t feel more well informed. I just feel tired.

Is this useful to me? Or I am more useful to it?

There’s a saying you’ll find on the Internet about “free” services: if you’re not the customer, you’re the product. That article is over seven years old, and the saying at this point is almost a cliche. But look closely enough, and you’ll realize it’s as accurate today as it was then. It’s commonplace to do a search for something online, then find small ads scattered across the Internet showing you that very thing. Check your email and you’ll find ads suggesting that or similar items, just a click away for purchase. If you like this, you might also like…

A recent episode of one of my favorite podcasts investigates if facebook might even be listening to what you say through the microphone on your phone. Their findings are, to my mind, inconclusive, but there are plenty of privacy issues discussed along the way. Gizmodo has quite a breakdown of some of the ways facebook can track you. A sampling: where you’re going, websites you visit, your financial status, status updates you almost post, your emotional state, and more. And heck, while they may not own your photos, facebook grants themselves permission to use your photos however they like in their terms of service. (This is true of other social networks as well.)

Some former employees are speaking out, too, and saying we can’t trust these companies to regulate themselves. With the streams of information, and the constant need to always have new information ready to be consumed, it’s a wonder we can make sense of anything today. We’re shouting into the void, and we’re only making a bigger mess for ourselves as a result. To return again to Reply All, their recent story on conspiracy theories in Mexico strike a frighteningly similar chord to our own US elections both in 2016 and 2017 in how social media played a crucial role in the outcomes.

We can’t seem to tear ourselves away, and the use of automation and the interconnected nature of these networks is amplifying everything to degrees I think we’re only just beginning to realize. The desire to be connected was exploited for profit, and big data (engagement, clicks, and more) is the consequence. Considering how to unplug might be a great start to finding our way back to reason.

As someone who came of age at the same time the Internet was doing the same, I’ve been a fan and a champion of many of the services that cropped up along the way. I’ve been blogging on and off since the early days. I started using facebook when it was just for college students. I was an early adopter of twitter, and used to feel like it made me an even better writer because it imposed a 140-character limit on what I could write.

I marveled at how the Internet helped connect me to people so far away. I’ve made wonderful friends across the world this way, and still love it for that. Lately, the connection I used to feel seems to have dissipated. I see streams of information wherever I turn. Gone is the reverse chronological order of posts, replaced by algorithms which decide what I see next. The chance to make a connection has been replaced by the goal to get the most attention, and I feel more disconnected than ever.

I look for ways to fill my time, dream of writing something that matters to me, and wonder why I struggle. Oh well, maybe if I just look over here, I might feel inspired.

I forget how to think critically and look for small bytes of information to grasp an understanding. The stream moves so quickly that it’s all I can do to keep up, but the faster it moves, the more I want to try. Should I be mad? Should I be sad? If I don’t say something right away, and on every platform, does it mean I have no feeling about this, or am not empathetic enough?

Slow down, I think. Take a step back. Too many things are trying to grab your attention. Too many services want you to use them to say what you need to say. They measure your “engagement” and tell you your statistics, and how to make those statistics grow. Numbers. Meaningless numbers in the place of meaningful connections.

It’s all noise. Noise to steal your attention away from yourself. Away from the people who are important. Away from the things that need you.

Maybe to take it back, you can go back to the place that really started it. Go back to the thing you loved first, before the other things took you away from there. Try it once, then twice. Maybe a third time. See if those dry roots start to show some signs of life.

Look at news nowadays, and you see extremes even in the language used in headlines. Shock value is a time honored attention-grabber. If it bleeds, it leads. Mind the clickbait.

Verbal commentary is now rife with extremes. Someone is blasted or slammed for any number of reasons. There’s an awful lot of shouting going on, with very little listening.

I know I'm not alone in how lost I have felt since a gray November day last year. I'm still reeling, but am on a constant lookout for sparks of light and humanity, for genuine caring and good. Sometimes it comes in places you least expect to see it, but when it jumps out at you, hold on tight and don't let go.

In today's case, this video about a secret of radio, from one of my favorite podcast hosts, Lulu Miller of Invisibilia, was particularly striking. Watch it, but most importantly, listen.

-via Swiss Miss