Freedom from the short form
Some of us will feel this sooner than others, but it's virtually inevitable
We are collectively going crazy, and I needed to write this down somewhere even if I sound like a cynical grandmother. I do hope to grow into one anyway.
Of the many hundred reasons to be alarmed by the effect of short form content, this is what shocked me into action - half knowledge. I’m full of it, because of all the time I've spent looking at 10 second videos and 20 second tweets assaulting my attention constantly.
I normally think of myself as someone who doesn’t easily fall for propaganda or misinformation, I take my time to learn about things before I form an opinion on them, I’m a well-read person with reasonable critical thinking skills and verbal skills to articulate complex ideas…. I could take that whole bucket of positive self-image and throw it out the window about now.
In the last 3-4 months, I’ve caught myself parroting lazy bits of information from Twitter that I haven’t had the time to verify, or I didn’t even read the whole thread cos I wasn’t interested. Somehow, without my consent, those sticky bits of half-information float around, and in casual IRL conversations, I‘ve been reflexively repeating what I (half-)knew.
You want examples? I had somehow registered in my brain that Arundati Roy was in jail. Why? Cos a few weeks back, twitter exploded about how the government is going after her, but I wasn’t interested in that news at all (don’t judge me, I have the right to be disinterested) I didn’t want to read anything about it, but I couldn’t effectively block out what my feed thought about it. Days later, I’m inanely making conversation like “did you know they arrested your favourite author?” OMG - she wasn’t. Why am I talking about things that I don’t know anything about? I don’t want to be this person.
It really does creep up on you. This could happen with any medium of information, of course, but twitter is one of the worst offenders. Any short form content, to characterize it better. The type of content that is designed to catch your attention so well, that you have no power against “the hook”. By the time you realise you don’t want to read/hear/watch something, 3-5 seconds of information-dense, rapidly spoken, half-knowledge has already been injected into your mind passively. You’re not processing that information, not even pausing to consider if it was real. You swiped away, it’s gone, right? No, it’s not! Even minimal exposure sticks.
What a time to be alive. Who would have though, that on the glorious age of information, one of the most important skills will be learning how to consume well. Exactly the same as food and nutrition.
Speaking of which, I’ve been free of sugar-addiction for several months now, and I’m loving it. Several big upsides - easier control with portion sizes, minimal cravings and even mildly sweet things taste so good!
I need similar de-addiction from short-form media, in both consuming and producing.
Hopefully, cultivating long-form writing habits will help in many ways:
reduce the tendency to think in pithy one-liners,
remind myself that complex is good, and
give myself lots of canvas space to think, I firmly believe writing is one of the best forms of thinking.
Does this mean I must get off twitter? This is going to be hard for several reasons. I don’t have colleagues - I work alone. Twitter is where my friends are. Maybe I get more intentional about who I follow, and only ever browse the “following” tab? Let me try that for a week and report back here with observations.
To take that a step further, I could also start to follow friends on their own long-form platforms and slowly disengage from twitter. Just that thought made me realise how I’d much rather have friends on substack than twitter.
It was so important for me to think through all of this, paying attention to what I really want - right now, slow feels good, long feels great.