[Image: "Cold bird" by alex ranaldi, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.]
Regular readers know I’ve been drastically changing my own habits around the digital world. I will admit I didn’t do a perfect job of keeping my planned fast from legacy social media, which technically ends today. During October I did jump back into the Chasm once or twice to reshare things, mainly to oblige people who’d been kind to me and in service of our work together.
Even so, it felt like the right degree and kind of engagement. I got in, I got out; I didn’t fall into any attentional vortices. I didn’t end up off-script in unproductive ways.
So from now on I’ll be seeking to continue that pattern—to show up minimally or not at all in those digital spaces that seem to invite the shredding and diffusing of attention. Being excessively online can feel like having your attention span pushed sideways and backwards through an industrial cheese grater. The past six weeks or so, by contrast, have felt … reconstitutive.
From now on I’m going to be looking as much as possible for spaces that seem (as far as I can judge) to provide connection rather than isolation, clarity rather than its counterfeits, contemplative nourishments rather than extractive and reactive exploitations.
To me all this feels like a practical unpacking of the contemplative realist insight that
ideologies and technological innovations … promise to provide clear windows but instead function as unreal filters, distorting the mind’s rapprochement with reality. … [T]his hampering of the humane is itself a story worth telling: the way the various non-convivial tools of the technocracy we inhabit can remake [us] into something close to a mere moving picture consuming shadows.  (Hren, Contemplative Realism, 61)
Note well: our struggles to get this balance right constitute a story worth telling. Yes, it’s silly to show up in digital spaces merely in order to complain about the disruptive existence and characteristic ills of digital spaces. (This is a common online habit, but also a bit of a self-contradiction.) But this is not what I’m doing, nor is it what I see others doing in several recent and wise reevaluations of their own and/or our culture’s digital habits. Rather, the call is to stay thoughtful and intentional about whether, when, how, and why we engage online: aware of dangers but open to gifts, like adventurers who set out on a road—not knowing what may befall them, but at least forearmed and prepared.
Where are you finding refreshment, reintegration, renewal today (online or off)? Leave us all a trail of breadcrumbs to follow in the comments. Oh, and happy All Souls’ Day.
Glad to hear it's going well.
Hi Katy (waves across a room of virtual friends....many whom we have in common). I'm so glad to have found you here on Substack.
I've been writing online since 2012 and circled the virtual water cooler of social media for way too long...my discontent and unease only increased the last year or so and I finally walked away completely from IG in April and FB end of September of this year.
The impetus was a podcast called Writing off Social (find them on your favorite platform). I've since taken their inaugural course and learned a t o n about how to build a platform (I do loathe that word) without social media. I've written about it quite recently here on the 'stack. You might take a moment to check it out when you have a chance.
ps. This fellow birder applauds the recent post photo :-)