Abstract
Although social media remains as ubiquitous as it was a decade ago, modern users report increasing concerns around privacy and screen addiction (Noschitt-Sherlock et al., 2019). In the present study, subjects voluntarily agreed to replace the compulsive use of social media with the maintenance of a list of “Moments” on their mobile devices. Results were mixed, suggesting that the content of social media may be divorced only in part from its inherently social form. All participating subjects were 28-year-old males noted for their quick wit, dashing looks, and masterful production of breakfast sandwiches (n = 1).
Slightly Less Abstract
A few months ago, I felt like I was checking Twitter too much on my phone. I decided to give myself a challenge: Any time I felt the urge to scroll, I would instead create a “Moment,” or tweet-like composition in the iPhone Notes app. This exercise worked in that my desire to check Twitter went away pretty quickly. However, while my list was superficially similar to a mini newsfeed, its private nature led to some key departures from social media. (Just to be clear: This is an “experiment” only in the lay sense of the word—not the true scientific one. The format of the writeup is for fun.)
Introduction
These days, it’s hardly a novel observation that the bloom is off the rose of social media. Substack continues to beef with Elon Musk over Notes; major media outlets declare Twitter dead and speculate about the “new new reading” environment; Montana is banning TikTok. For me, though, this pet project started earlier—or maybe bubbled up concurrently—when I decided for purely personal reasons that I was dissatisfied with my Twitter use: It had once again become a vapid, reflexive thing I did at the slightest sign of boredom or discomfort.
I’ve argued in the past for replacing social media with a skimbox—a personal email devoted to newsletters, articles, and other reading materials. I still use my skimbox and think it’s a worthwhile system! But after a year or so, I’ve been forced to concede that a skimbox is not quite as seamless a replacement for social media as I’d first hoped: Sometimes, I don’t have the time to read a whole blog post or essay on my phone; sometimes I don’t have the motivation.1
In this vein, my Moments grew out of both a push factor and pull factor—the push: a desire to cut back on Twitter; the pull: an aspiration toward a new social media replacement (i.e., in addition to my skimbox) that would prove less effortful than longform reading but not so mindless as doomscrolling. Furthermore, I was curious to observe what the artistic fruits of this exercise would be: Could the tweet as a genre of text be successfully decoupled from Twitter the platform?
Finally, a quick disclaimer: I’m not a luddite or a puritan. In other words, I’m not sure what the optimal amount of phone use is (and no doubt it will vary from person to person), but total abstinence seems to me neither practical nor desirable. I am, however, wary of the ubiquity of social media in many of our lives, and persuaded by those like
who have documented its pernicious effects on young people in particular.Methods
At the start of this endeavor, I laid out the following rules for myself—typed out at the top of a note on my phone:
Rules (2/16/23): Any time I have the urge to use Twitter on my phone, I'll write down an idea instead. It can be an observation of something I'm currently feeling or perceiving, or it can be a general thought about the world. Questions ok too. I can tinker with the language while I’m writing them, but for no longer than a couple minutes. Minimal editing after the fact.2
Although not stated explicitly in these rules, I should clarify that I have continued to use Twitter on my computer, and I’ll still look at tweets sent to me via text. My goal was simply to stop checking the platform compulsively.
Results
Behaviorally, this experiment was a decided success: I stopped checking Twitter on my phone. Early on, there were a couple times when I opened up a tweet someone had sent and then found myself scrolling out of habit; otherwise, my Moments really has been completely effective at curbing this impulse—and quite quickly!
Psychologically, I would call the experiment a modest success. My internal drive toward recording Moments observed something of a U-shaped function:
In greater detail:
A) At first—in the throes of Twitter withdrawal—I would often find myself reflexively pulling out my phone to scroll; this behavior served as a natural trigger for a Moment and meant that I was jotting down multiple per day.
B) Over the first few weeks, as the original trigger waned and the novelty of the experience wore off, I fell out of the habit of recording Moments. In this phase, I had cut out Twitter but not yet fully integrated the new practice into my life. I would often find myself opening up random non-Twitter apps on my phone (like gmail, or my checking account), and several days might pass in between Moments.
C) Slowly, I started to build a more stable practice around my Moments. At time of writing, they’ve become fairly regular (maybe one or two a day on average) but they don’t feel automatic to the extent that Twitter was before.
Materially, after four months, I’ve generated 129 Moments. Here’s a curated sample:
Sometimes, talking doesn’t help.
Do flowers actually smell good? I think they just smell like pollen.
Only my toes are cold.
We are rounding the corner of the year.
Getting fucking BLASTED right now (eating flavor blasted goldfish).
Slept well. Soft gray light streams through the windows.
Yogurt might be the objectively grossest food that is still yummy.
I suspect that the most interesting jobs are the ones school prepares you the worst for. This is because success in them isn’t defined simply by how well you complete assignments, but by an ongoing effort to *find* assignments worth completing.
Kind of horrifying that we keep our toothbrushes in the same room where we poop?
I very quickly fell out of the habit of doing this. Not enough reward for behavior? Do I care?
Get yourself a man who makes quiet grunts of approval while he chews.
Everyone wants a sunny day, but no one wants a swamp ass.
Black cable, waving in the wind out my living room window: a strand of modernity.
Checking my phone at a urinal.
I’m always productive on trains: the finite block of time; the sense of forward movement.
Pretty bored by Trump at this point.
Unforced error: ate several scoops of granola and half a jar of kimchi immediately before going on a run.
Sometimes a task rears insistently in your vision, fanged and spitting, until you strike it dead. And when it’s slayed, two more rear in its place, then four—then eight: the shrieking hydra of all that cannot be accomplished in a lifetime. So watch the serpents shed their scales; watch them shrink to placid worms; watch them burrow in cool, damp earth: the germ of the first green shoots.
Getting my boots resoled.
It seems as if a lot of how school goes is like: Teacher says “Do this,” and you do it and say “Is this good?” and the teacher says “Yeah, this rules!” or “No, this sucks,” and then you get a report card. Whereas a lot of how real life goes is like: Zero instruction, so you do something and say “Is this good?” and everyone says “Uh...sure?” and you're like “Ok...thanks,” and then unrelated you file your taxes and find out you owe the government thousands of dollars.
Words learned recently: invidious, coruscation.
Steam curling out of a freshly removed cleat: gross, but kind of beautiful?
Might legitimately have a low-level sriracha addiction.
Sometimes in the middle of a song or podcast, the world will offer up a perfect visual to match the sound, and life feels like a movie.
Balance isn’t just moderation; it’s also variation.
There should be a way to duplicate drafts in gmail.
Feeling scattered and frenetic. I’ve done a lot today, but it's as if I have a lot of mental tabs open. I haven't properly closed all of these tasks.
You can always fit another pair of socks.
Should I get a Neti Pot?
Man across from me on subway eating applesauce with a screwdriver...
Discussion
The best and most surprising benefit of my Moments has been as a focusing or mindfulness technique. Once I open up the Moments note on my phone, I’m confronted with the need to come up with something to say, and this begs the question “What am I thinking/noticing right now?” Over time, I’ve felt this question strengthen from an effortful behavior to more of a habit of mind: That is, I believe some unconscious part of my brain is now monitoring whether thoughts and perceptions are Moment-worthy. On the margins, I think this has made me slightly more attuned to the subtleties of both my internal and external world—as if I’m constantly clicking little mental snapshots.
In a totally overt way, too, my Moments serves as a log of what I’m attending to—with certain preoccupations reemerging often and others loosely tracking the events of my life. (Looking over the list, I was surprised to see how many Moments referred to food, for example; perhaps this is a byproduct of often pulling out my phone during meals?) Both of these mindfulness benefits (honing observation, and crystalizing thoughts throughout time) have taken months to accrue; I think this helps explain the initial dip and gradual rise of my interest in the exercise.
That said, it’s definitely true that my Moments still doesn’t feel as automatic as Twitter used to, and I have some ambivalence about this. When I think about the project abstractly, I like the idea of my Moments integrating into my life as effortlessly as its predecessor. But perhaps that effortlessness was exactly the problem with Twitter? It may well be that the distinction between “healthy habit” and “addiction” is a difference of degree rather than kind; maybe the best each individual can do is find their own sweet spot between the pleasantly thought-provoking and the addictively overstimulating.
Let’s now turn to a squishier issue: To what extent can the genre of tweet be decoupled from the platform of Twitter? In answering this question, I should confess that I knew from the start I’d likely use my Moments as source material for a blog post. No doubt, this imagined end product has colored the project in subtle ways.
Still, it’s also true that I always planned to keep to myself much of what I’d written (some Moments felt too personal, and a lot were just boring), so I treated the exercise with significantly less inhibition than I would traditional social media; I think this spirit of exploration comes through in the list. While some of these read like tweets, the majority decidedly do not (or at least, not like the kinds of tweets I tweet). Compared to Twitter, some Moments are too earnest, some are too navel-gazey, and some are more poetry than prose. I suspect most people would have a similar experience with the exercise: Free from likes, comments, and other eyeballs, content naturally drifts toward greater variety and experimentation.
(Interestingly, looking at my full list of 129, I subjectively judge the “quality” of my median Moment to be worse than that of my median tweet. However, the best Moments seem to me more lively and interesting than my best tweets. In other words, greater permissiveness leads to more garbage but also more rare gems. This makes me wonder how common it is for Twitter power users to have their own version of Moments, from which they harvest the ideas most worth posting.)
All this said, a list of random musings on my phone clearly lacks much of the richness and excitement of Twitter—what with its bottomless grab bag of memes and shitposts and dreams of virality. Again, I think this may on some level be a feature of my Moments (there seems little risk of getting addicted to a static list of my own creation), but it also means that the activity is in a basic sense less fun.3 Ultimately, I’m still not sure whether it’s possible to create digital spaces that are every bit as engaging as social media but without the negative side effects; maybe entertainment is inextricably linked to addictiveness. I hope not.4
Besides, it’s only been a few months—far too early to say whether my investment in this project will wane or grow through the years. I’m cautiously optimistic for what it will become. Perhaps at the end of a life full of Moments, a sweet old geezer lounges in his armchair, munching on a breakfast sandwich—savoring the timeless scroll of who he used to be.
Of course, the higher barrier to entry imposed by the skimbox is arguably a feature—i.e., the knowledge that I’m committing to a full article forces me to be honest about how much time I actually want to/am able to spend. (This in stark contrast to traditional social media which offers the false promise of “stop whenever you want!” when in fact three minutes can easily lapse into thirty.) My Moments imposes a similar kind of behavioral friction (I also naturally take a beat before opening it)—but to a much lesser extent than my skimbox.
I tweaked these rules slightly in the first couple weeks of the exercise to allow for “minimal editing.” My Moments aren’t meant to be labored over, but sometimes looking over the list I would have an overwhelming sense that a different word choice would better capture the idea I was going for and make a minor revision.
Sometimes, the exercise itself does promote a pleasant sense of discovery, such as an observation of some previously unnoticed feature of the room I’m in—but this hardly matches the satisfaction of reading a salacious headline or particularly savage dunk.
Some have noted that smaller digital communities (e.g., Discord or a good old fashioned group text) seem to be making a comeback .
Woah love this. Going to try it