This is so spot on Mina. As someone who has social media but does not have the apps on my phone (I really only use to post a few times a year- basically I use social media but I don’t consume it) I have a really interesting perspective on all of this. Because I don’t consume discourse, I am able to love what I love freely, and pick and choose the content I want to watch or receive about it. It’s actually quite sad to me that people are turning things they love into real life anxieties, or dimming their initial positive feelings about it, just because of what other people are saying. I am able to experience the internet without the algorithm, because I go on the platforms to search and not to scroll. I think if people are feeling overwhelmed by the abundance of discourse, this is a great way to 1 limit your screen time and 2 only consume things that fulfill your needs, whether that be entertainment, inspiration, or education.
how do you prevent yourself from overconsuming? i find that i'm someone with low self-discipline and so it's easier for me to delete an account (like I did with Twitter) than it is to put limits around it.
Great question. I should first say that I am a person who generally has very high self-discipline however I think everyone can get addicted to social media. 1, My phone reverts to black and white at 7pm everyday which makes going on it a bore. 2, I read A LOT. But if you’re gonna not go online and read instead you have to let yourself read dumb shit too and not just “literature”. I read a lot of Amor Towles and Kurt Vonnegut, but I also read Emily Henry. 3, I have come to understand that adding silence into my life is a huge positive. I want to be bored so my brain has to find ways to beat the boredom on its own. 4, I’m very lucky that all 4 of my siblings and parents don’t have social media so there’s always lots to discuss amongst ourselves off of it; you have to find topics and things to discuss with friends that don’t require you to be online! My biggest tip is that you have to find a week that allows you to do no social media because once you realize you actually aren’t missing anything REAL, your desire is tamped down drastically. If I am completely honest, I began to get very freaked out by the different realties that were simultaneously happening on social media and in real life. Social media plucks problems out of thin air, creating anxieties and issues out of nothing- a false reality. It takes you out of the present. I really try my best to enjoy and stay in the present, and if you want to do that it’s almost impossible to get lost in the scroll. Sorry for the long response, I am just so passionate about this and have been thinking about it a lot!
I dabble in BookTok, and I think some of the discourse on there is cursed. But so is the discourse about the discourse. There are a million videos out there about how BookTok is ruining reading, and while there are some fair points, I think it devolves into a bit into "Mr. Stockman-ism". I enjoy litfic and there's a BookTok community for it if you look, but it's not going to be academic literary criticism. Nor is it bad to enjoy genre fiction for what it is. Your points about the medium are great - these places aren't meant to be perfect, curated journalism. It's hard to find a balance with these platforms and I don't have the answers but I appreciate your piece.
re: going back to email subscriptions, I use an rss reader for all the substacks I'm interested in reading. I've never used the substack main page and now that I know it's been algorithm-ified I never will. long live the rss reader (I use inoreader but there's loads of good options out there) (i had to rediscover an old account to post this comment lol)
Great read! I think this phrase really hits on a key issue in discourse today. There’s a fine line between valuing expertise and crossing over into elitism, which can alienate and shut down meaningful conversation.
I would love to quote this whole thing, I kept nodding along to so much of this. McLuhan has been so essential to me in understanding what we're seeing, looking beyond the (predictable and understandable) human responses and at what is encouraging and prompting and escalating things. The tech itself, the infrastructure the way the algorithms train us and shape discourse... this is all so often pushed aside.
(I will probably end up referencing this piece in one of my own, but it won't be about this discourse, but another one that I think ignores the infrastructure that is training consumer behaviour...!)
This is so interesting! I’m only just starting to spend more time on Substack so this is a really interesting insight. When I read the article about anti-intellectualism I was interested in the take but I was confused. This post added some clarification. Now I just need to come to terms with what this platform wants from me and what I want from it.
I've been off most social media for a while… I swear I didn't get like 70% of the events/dynamics you referenced. I had to work my head around it, which in retrospect is quite funny.
Regarding the tiktok criticism you mentioned (saying your YT content isn't academic enough), I find that your videos really accessible for a large range of people and are a good balance of being informative and interesting. I don't know if that says anything about me haha
we're all slowly going back to irl. also, where do you write your drafts? do you use word or google docs? I hate that word keeps trying to correct me with the red squiggly lines under my slang or spanish. do you just ignore it? it's visually irritating
The algorithm invades and degrades every good online space. I was really enjoying substack for a while —both for reading and writing — and when notes appeared, it got too frenetic and quick-fixy and I grew exhausted. I soon abandoned what was once my favorite place to linger online. (I’m back today because my daughter shared the link to this.)
The elite / anti-intellectual thing…well I need to keep thinking about that, because in These Modern Times the elite have also become as anti-intellectual as everyone else. So it’s gotten muddled.
When I was a girl, long long ago, anti-intellectual people tended to have very simplistic black-and-white views on any topic. And the elite were often those who received fancy educations and had fancy opportunities and who could be on the one hand (at times) annoyingly snobbish about food or wine or books or political views, and on the other hand they were also often “experts” in some area, whether epidemiology or physics or philosophy —and we would often do well to suspend our distaste for their unrelatable snobbery and listen to them when it mattered.
That poor Mr Stockmann lost his sh*t and responded very badly to the town’s gaslighting doesn’t take away that he did in fact have valuable information.
But in today’s climate, we are all — including the educated elite and perhaps especially the educated elite — just as rigid and simplistic and black-and-white in our views as any regressive talk radio host of the 90s who called women “feminazis.”
We have become rigid and simplistic. We know what our team believes, and we believe it too. Our beliefs come to us prepackaged in large predictable groupings — and good luck getting anyone to have a nuanced conversation in which they really listen to someone share opinions they disagree with, and try to understand the person, instead of just trotting out Their Team’s Applicable Belief and reciting it like a catechism.
We are all trained to throw out babies with bath water. If a guy makes a truly horrible comment about mutts, he’s lost us — he’s now a “bad guy” — no matter how right he is that the hot springs are gonna make us all sick.
And how did we get so dumb, and so simplistic, and so rigid — even the most educated among us? It’s the algorithm, feeding us stuff that outrages and scares and angers us, so that we stay maximally defensive and engaged. “Who said WHAT at tonight’s debate? Omg that’s just crazy we can’t let THAT person win.”
I include myself in this, though I fight it. We are all anti-intellectual now.
personal anecdote: i actually started a substack account just to subscribe to your newsletter (of which i've now read 2 of and both lovedddd) and it made me more interested in what the website itself had to offer. except when i realized the home page was just another fyp but for essays, it immediately turned me off. like you said, the questions and criticisms surrounding the concept of girl/womanhood have been... very saturated as of late and seeing loads of that even more here (as a literary girl myself, the echo chamber is inevitable), it just reinforced the idea that maybe touching some grass might be the better move. yk?
This is so spot on Mina. As someone who has social media but does not have the apps on my phone (I really only use to post a few times a year- basically I use social media but I don’t consume it) I have a really interesting perspective on all of this. Because I don’t consume discourse, I am able to love what I love freely, and pick and choose the content I want to watch or receive about it. It’s actually quite sad to me that people are turning things they love into real life anxieties, or dimming their initial positive feelings about it, just because of what other people are saying. I am able to experience the internet without the algorithm, because I go on the platforms to search and not to scroll. I think if people are feeling overwhelmed by the abundance of discourse, this is a great way to 1 limit your screen time and 2 only consume things that fulfill your needs, whether that be entertainment, inspiration, or education.
how do you prevent yourself from overconsuming? i find that i'm someone with low self-discipline and so it's easier for me to delete an account (like I did with Twitter) than it is to put limits around it.
Great question. I should first say that I am a person who generally has very high self-discipline however I think everyone can get addicted to social media. 1, My phone reverts to black and white at 7pm everyday which makes going on it a bore. 2, I read A LOT. But if you’re gonna not go online and read instead you have to let yourself read dumb shit too and not just “literature”. I read a lot of Amor Towles and Kurt Vonnegut, but I also read Emily Henry. 3, I have come to understand that adding silence into my life is a huge positive. I want to be bored so my brain has to find ways to beat the boredom on its own. 4, I’m very lucky that all 4 of my siblings and parents don’t have social media so there’s always lots to discuss amongst ourselves off of it; you have to find topics and things to discuss with friends that don’t require you to be online! My biggest tip is that you have to find a week that allows you to do no social media because once you realize you actually aren’t missing anything REAL, your desire is tamped down drastically. If I am completely honest, I began to get very freaked out by the different realties that were simultaneously happening on social media and in real life. Social media plucks problems out of thin air, creating anxieties and issues out of nothing- a false reality. It takes you out of the present. I really try my best to enjoy and stay in the present, and if you want to do that it’s almost impossible to get lost in the scroll. Sorry for the long response, I am just so passionate about this and have been thinking about it a lot!
I would love to hear your thoughts on how social media is used as a medium for activism
I dabble in BookTok, and I think some of the discourse on there is cursed. But so is the discourse about the discourse. There are a million videos out there about how BookTok is ruining reading, and while there are some fair points, I think it devolves into a bit into "Mr. Stockman-ism". I enjoy litfic and there's a BookTok community for it if you look, but it's not going to be academic literary criticism. Nor is it bad to enjoy genre fiction for what it is. Your points about the medium are great - these places aren't meant to be perfect, curated journalism. It's hard to find a balance with these platforms and I don't have the answers but I appreciate your piece.
re: going back to email subscriptions, I use an rss reader for all the substacks I'm interested in reading. I've never used the substack main page and now that I know it's been algorithm-ified I never will. long live the rss reader (I use inoreader but there's loads of good options out there) (i had to rediscover an old account to post this comment lol)
Great read! I think this phrase really hits on a key issue in discourse today. There’s a fine line between valuing expertise and crossing over into elitism, which can alienate and shut down meaningful conversation.
I would love to quote this whole thing, I kept nodding along to so much of this. McLuhan has been so essential to me in understanding what we're seeing, looking beyond the (predictable and understandable) human responses and at what is encouraging and prompting and escalating things. The tech itself, the infrastructure the way the algorithms train us and shape discourse... this is all so often pushed aside.
(I will probably end up referencing this piece in one of my own, but it won't be about this discourse, but another one that I think ignores the infrastructure that is training consumer behaviour...!)
This is so interesting! I’m only just starting to spend more time on Substack so this is a really interesting insight. When I read the article about anti-intellectualism I was interested in the take but I was confused. This post added some clarification. Now I just need to come to terms with what this platform wants from me and what I want from it.
I've been off most social media for a while… I swear I didn't get like 70% of the events/dynamics you referenced. I had to work my head around it, which in retrospect is quite funny.
Keep trying be off your phone! It's a wonder!
I love you so much, you’re such an important voice for this platform.
Regarding the tiktok criticism you mentioned (saying your YT content isn't academic enough), I find that your videos really accessible for a large range of people and are a good balance of being informative and interesting. I don't know if that says anything about me haha
we're all slowly going back to irl. also, where do you write your drafts? do you use word or google docs? I hate that word keeps trying to correct me with the red squiggly lines under my slang or spanish. do you just ignore it? it's visually irritating
Mina once you started talking about An Enemy of the People I could no longer think because Victoria Pedretti is the light of my life
right – there's such a fine line between intellectualism and elitism, and I don't think it's really possible to define it perfectly
The algorithm invades and degrades every good online space. I was really enjoying substack for a while —both for reading and writing — and when notes appeared, it got too frenetic and quick-fixy and I grew exhausted. I soon abandoned what was once my favorite place to linger online. (I’m back today because my daughter shared the link to this.)
The elite / anti-intellectual thing…well I need to keep thinking about that, because in These Modern Times the elite have also become as anti-intellectual as everyone else. So it’s gotten muddled.
When I was a girl, long long ago, anti-intellectual people tended to have very simplistic black-and-white views on any topic. And the elite were often those who received fancy educations and had fancy opportunities and who could be on the one hand (at times) annoyingly snobbish about food or wine or books or political views, and on the other hand they were also often “experts” in some area, whether epidemiology or physics or philosophy —and we would often do well to suspend our distaste for their unrelatable snobbery and listen to them when it mattered.
That poor Mr Stockmann lost his sh*t and responded very badly to the town’s gaslighting doesn’t take away that he did in fact have valuable information.
But in today’s climate, we are all — including the educated elite and perhaps especially the educated elite — just as rigid and simplistic and black-and-white in our views as any regressive talk radio host of the 90s who called women “feminazis.”
We have become rigid and simplistic. We know what our team believes, and we believe it too. Our beliefs come to us prepackaged in large predictable groupings — and good luck getting anyone to have a nuanced conversation in which they really listen to someone share opinions they disagree with, and try to understand the person, instead of just trotting out Their Team’s Applicable Belief and reciting it like a catechism.
We are all trained to throw out babies with bath water. If a guy makes a truly horrible comment about mutts, he’s lost us — he’s now a “bad guy” — no matter how right he is that the hot springs are gonna make us all sick.
And how did we get so dumb, and so simplistic, and so rigid — even the most educated among us? It’s the algorithm, feeding us stuff that outrages and scares and angers us, so that we stay maximally defensive and engaged. “Who said WHAT at tonight’s debate? Omg that’s just crazy we can’t let THAT person win.”
I include myself in this, though I fight it. We are all anti-intellectual now.
well said! 👏
personal anecdote: i actually started a substack account just to subscribe to your newsletter (of which i've now read 2 of and both lovedddd) and it made me more interested in what the website itself had to offer. except when i realized the home page was just another fyp but for essays, it immediately turned me off. like you said, the questions and criticisms surrounding the concept of girl/womanhood have been... very saturated as of late and seeing loads of that even more here (as a literary girl myself, the echo chamber is inevitable), it just reinforced the idea that maybe touching some grass might be the better move. yk?