When asked on a podcast how Jia Tolentino self-edited her iconic book of essays, ‘Trick Mirror’ she said this: “I go through every single word and ask, is this absolutely necessary”.
At the time, cruising home in commuter traffic, the comment stuck purely because, as someone constantly tasked with self-editing, it seemed like a useful technique.
It wasn’t until a few days later when I considered the advice in a broader (more confronting) sense; how different would life be if I applied the same rule to other words?
Not just a tightened article draft but texts and Facebook messages, emails and texts and even conversations.
Within reason of course. We are relational beings gifted with the ability to know and be known through the words we trade. For fellow external processors, verbalising doesn't just communicate our feelings or solutions but helps realise them.
But, what about the rest of the words and characters? How much of our communication each day is that necessary? How much do we say (or type) simply because we can.
More importantly, how much of this excessive communication is responsible for that infamous phenomenon - burnout? A compulsion to continue contributing even as we drown under too much of everything all of the time.
Many conversations call out the endless stream of content. Fewer discuss how much we voluntarily participate.
Debates on technology and communication inevitably feel super modern, making it surprising to learn people desired a ‘politics of silence’ for years before computers fit into pockets or palms.
In 1995, French philosopher Gilles Deleuze attacked society for the way it coerces us into constant communication as a means to control and exploit. The famous thinker railing against radio for how it saturated people with “pointless talk, insane quantities of words and images”.
Repression of the people, according to Deleuze in his book ‘Negotiations’, was no longer achieved by preventing self-expression (as historically done) but by mandating it, constantly.
Therefore, the issue wasn’t how to get people to express themselves but “providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say.”
When looking at how to live a more meaningful, free and rich life, the solution for Deleuze would never be more communication, more self-expression, more talk and opinions and clarification, but the opposite.
“What a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing,” he says, “only then is there a chance of framing the rare, and ever rare, thing that might be worth saying.”
Some two decades later this diagnosis continues to echo through cultural critiques such as ‘The Burnout Society’ by Korean-German psychologist Byung-Chul Han. His deceptively slim book a ruthless exposition of a society where ‘generalized communication and surplus information threatens to overwhelm all human defences’.
It’s this torrent of ‘noise’ (and a mandate to participate), Han blames for our growing inability to use one of humanity's most fundamental skills; single-minded, contemplative attention.
In Han’s words, “We owe the cultural achievements of humanity to deep, contemplative attention.”
Sure, multitasking is a bit of a lifesaver (quite literally from an evolutionary perspective), helping us navigate threats and survive stressful situations. However, our brains have boundaries; we cannot think deeply, thoroughly and dividedly, no matter how hard we try.
It’s not just the depth of experience or richness of thought life at stake if we consider the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, but our autonomy as well.
The German philosopher writing in 1888 that, “every characteristic absence of spirituality, every piece of common vulgarity, is due to an inability to resist a stimulus - you have to react, you follow every impulse.”
(Note, this warning didn’t just predate social media or television… this was 10 years before radio.)
Nietzsche, Deleuze and Hans; three great minds all presenting the same key truth:
Freedom to communicate and react isn’t the same as freedom from having to constantly communicate and react.
Our ability to announce and disclose to close friends and total strangers (and receive the same in reuturn ) is sometimes, the most terrific thing in the world.
But the new ways we communicate do come with a cost; an unspoken expectation to be ‘very online’, always within reach and reaching out, all of the time.
You don’t need a scientific study to know this affects our behaviour and our brains, but hundreds exist nonetheless.
In a 2018 study called ‘Permanently Online And Permanently Connected’, academics from Johannes Gutenberg University in Germany describe the phenomena of ‘online vigilance’; a permanent cognitive orientation towards online content and communication.
The sort of thing that prompts us to prioritise offline > online, whether we actually do (e.g. replying to that text in front of your dinner date), or just think about it (mulling over an unanswered message while on a walk with a friend).
In ‘The “Online Brain”: How The Internet May Be Changing Our Cognition’, published in the World Psychiatric Association Journal in 2019, American researchers found multi-tasking on digital communication platforms don’t just reconfigure our neural pathways but stunt our attentional capacity. The dozens of conversations we have on numerous platforms creating an “easily distracted generation”.
We’re all familiar with criticisms around the pressure to be ‘very online’.
Yet, it’s no longer accurate to talk about it as if it’s a demand exerted by some amorphous ‘big tech’. It’s now internalised. An expectation we now ‘freely’ apply to ourselves and impose on others, creating a kind of digital Social Contract that only functions if we all play the game.
In this context, the irritation we can feel when others reject these expectations starts to make sense. A prickle of annoyance when they leave us on seen or spend a weekend tech-free.
So accustomed to having all of the information all of the time, it’s pretty difficult to see how entitled we’ve become to one another’s time, information, even location (people who track each other on maps, I’m looking at you).
Harder still to discern how much of that irritation is disguised insecurity about our inability to do the same.
It would be nice to think we don’t hold one another accountable for being very online but the reality is we probably do, even if we don’t notice.
Withholding a reply when they’ve made us wait, calling after 5 minutes of radio silence, making little guilt-loaded digs about how we were worried/upset/confused when they didn’t respond to our Instagram story or Facebook post tag.
As if it isn’t hard enough to be the one resisting. An act that is as unpopular as it is boring.
Admittedly, pitching something as boring isn’t the best marketing play. Better to position resisting ‘being online’ as thrilling, defiant, liberating and sexy (always sexy because #sexsells). Easier to ignore the nuance, the fact that something can be all of those things and slow and lonely too.
A truth made all the more unplesant in a society governed by Romanticism whereby ‘good things’ should, naturally ‘feel good’.
It’s hard to switch off, resist - even after reading the chilling predictions made by thinkers like Han or Deleuze - because, in the day to day, being online doesn’t feel like it’s eroding attention capacity, oppressing agency or problematic for democracy.
Most days, the pressure to be very online doesn’t even feel bad. If anything you feel busy. Important.
We rarely feel the consequences directly or explicitly. It’s more subtle; an ambient unsettledness or exhaustion just explainable enough not to push us to any extreme action.
There’s a post from a much loved Instagram account, @iamthirtyaf which, like Jia Tolentino’s quote, I think of often. Black text on a white background, it reads:
“Give yourself permission not to be accessible at all times. Ignore that voicemail. Leave that message on read. Turn off your phone. Don’t answer emails. Destroy your SIM card. Burn your house down. Disappear under mysterious circumstances.”
Relatable and funny, it’s one that regularly resurfaces on my feed and I love it because it’s perfect.
Because it points out how you must permit yourself; not just because no one else will, but no one else can. The pressure is a self-imposed construct.
Because it hits those warm-fuzzy suggestions of how to do it, yet just when it starts feeling like another yas-gal-love-yo-self cliché, it subverts itself. The advice growing increasingly ridiculous until it’s all undermined.
‘Go ahead', it seems to say, ‘give yourself permission, but know it’ll feel just as dramatic as arson or a missing person’.
I like that it acknowledges that. The way stepping back and switching off can feel excessive or difficult. To you and to others.
But I think it’s worth it, from time to time. To step away, power off, set the tech aside and check what kind of freedom you really have; freedom to… or freedom from.
Attention is pretty precious these days, so thanks for sharing yours.
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Sarah.
Attention is like time, we all have a finite supply with which we choose how best to use it.