Ceasing to Exist: Three Months in the Social Media Detox Ward

Notable Articles The Future of the Book
April 5, 2010 | 5 books mentioned 61 7 min read

Related Books:

coverWhen I was in my early-twenties, I made a new year’s resolution to stop looking at myself in the mirror so much.   It didn’t work, of course–what else can one do with a reflection besides look at it?   This year, in my late-twenties, I set a similar resolution: for four months, until April 1st, I would turn away from Facebook and Twitter.  I had grown bored, obsessed, bothered, even–I admit it–enamored with my reflection there.  And lord help me if I found myself at midnight yet again, drinking a glass a wine and scrolling through wedding photos of a friend of a friend of a friend, or, come morning, drinking a mug of coffee and vainly attempting to read and retweet one fascinating article after another.  J. Alfred Prufrock may have measured out his life with coffee spoons; I had begun to measure mine with status updates.

So I prepared my friends, my “friends,” and my followers (man, the way I kept track of my followers, you’d think I was a cult leader!), and on January 2nd, a loved one changed my passwords for me.  The whole internet seemed to collapse in a second, like the ocean knocking down an elaborate sand castle.  I suddenly had no access to the two sites I’d grown accustomed to checking over and over during the course of my day.  You see, I’m not internet savvy.  I don’t have an RSS reader, and I have no idea how one might procure such a thing.  Not that I want to.  I like visiting my favorite websites on a whim to see if there’s something new; it feels a little like Christmas, reaching into my stocking to see if there’s just one more piece of candy hidden in the toe.  The problem with Facebook and Twitter, I’ve realized, is that the Christmas stocking is infinite, and infinitely full.  There is always another piece of candy to claw at.  One piece is delicious, but one begets two, and three, and four, and, okay, five…it’s not long before you’ve made yourself sick.

The first week of my detox, I realized just how much I’d depended on those sites for community.  Aside from the classes I teach a few nights a week, I work from home.  Alone.   Without my beloved internet family, the silence was frightening. I began to spend more time on goodreads, and I sometimes got sucked into g-chat.  One night, exhausted from a day of reading and writing, I searched for entertainment online, and found The Bachelor.  Now I’m convinced there’s a patch of dead grass in my brain–it simply cannot be brought to life!

I also noticed how I kept a running Twitter feed in my head: Oh, not my crazy neighbors again!, and, Wow, has anyone read so-and-so’s novel? Someone suggested I keep these in a notebook, to be broadcast at a later date.  That might have been funny, but wasn’t the point of my detox to wrest myself away from this real-time cataloging of reactions, emotions, and experience?  I felt very much like Laurel Snyder did in her days away from the site.  In this Salon article, she sums up well the magnetism of Twitter (and, for me, the live update feed on Facebook as well):

Now I understand you don’t do things with Twitter. You become a part of it. That’s why it doesn’t work when people try to use it as a sporadic “marketing tool” or check in every three days. Twitter is unspooling in real time, and so what happened an hour ago is, well, in the past. Nobody will bother to read what you tweeted four hours ago any more than people at a get-together will overhear what happened before they got there. Like any party, if you duck in and out for a few minutes, you miss all the best parts.

The pain of missing “all the best parts” has been the hardest aspect of my detox.  I admit, when it was Doppelganger Week on Facebook, I felt downright bereft.  I wanted so badly to post as my profile picture a photo of Anthony Michael Hall circa Sixteen Candles! Or–wait–Chloe Sevigny in Kids!  Or wait…!  It felt like I was missing a class field trip to an amusement park.

I realized, too, how much news I was getting from Twitter.  I have never read the newspaper on a daily basis; I’d much rather listen to NPR, or read long-form magazine articles, or, as I did increasingly over the last year, get linked to news from people I follow online, journalists and novelists and poets who keep up with current events far better than I ever could.  A month into my detox, I was clueless–not just about the latest restaurant or movie, but about the new turn in the health care debate, for instance.  I’d felt like this once before, when my husband and I got rid of  cable, and effectively, television-watching.   The level of my family’s discourse often centers around the best new television commercials (I always wanted to be raised by professors, discussing Marxism and whatnot, but as my father would say, “People in hell want ice water.”)  In the post-television days, I remember feeling a vague alienation whenever these conversations began, my sister waxing poetic about the latest Volkswagen ad, everyone else nodding.   During my internet detox, I began to feel this way a lot, and not just with my family, but with my friends, too.  All conversations seemed to begin with, “Did you see on Facebook…”   I was suddenly an outsider, and I felt equal parts annoyed, superior and wistful.

coverAnd also relieved. In his book, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto, Jaron Lanier decries the devaluation of individual thought and personhood in a Web 2.0 world.  He writes:

Personal reductivism has always been present in information systems. You have to declare your status in reductive ways when you file a tax return.  Your real life is represented by a silly, phony set of database entries in order for you to make use of a service in an appropriate way.  Most people are aware of the difference between reality and database entries when they file taxes.

But the order is reversed when you perform the same kind of self-reduction in order to create a profile on a social networking site.  You fill in the data: profession, marital status, and residence.  But in this case digital reduction becomes a causal element, mediating contact between new friends.

I agree with Lanier here, though once your profile is set up, you can be quite creative.  Many of my online friends are writers and artists, and the content they generate is by turns smart, funny, and distinct.   If their status updates generate information for advertisers, well, then, fine.  I’d rather “The Man” try to sell me novels and nice pens, rather than tires and thigh-masters.  But Lanier makes a good point when he says,  “Information systems need to have information in order to run, but information underrepresents reality.”   I’m not my Facebook profile, nor am I a series of Twitter updates.  And the time I spend on these sites means I have less time to write fiction and converse with people in person, two things that make me feel most alive in the world.

At the opening of his book, Lanier suggests a few ways to use the internet to promote individual expression.  Spend time developing your narrative voice online.  (Check.)  Don’t post anonymously. (Check–well, most of the time.)  And, in a doozy of a sentence, he  suggests that Twitter-users stop describing “trivial external events… to avoid the creeping danger of believing that objectively described events define you, as they would describe a machine.”   Amen to that.

covercoverThe problem of the internet–its power, and the way it’s changing how we live our lives–is a big topic these days.    There’s The Tyranny of Email: The Four-Thousand Year Journey to Your In-Box by John Freeman, and, forthcoming, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr.  The internet age is so young that we’re worried, and intrigued, by how it will shape us–we simply have no idea.  The single most fascinating aspect of my detox was the number of people who wanted to talk to me about it.  Almost everyone I spoke to said, “I wish I could do that!”  Then they got this strained look in their eyes that meant, The internet is ruining my life! When I assured them a detox was easy to do, they weren’t convinced.  Or they said, “Okay, yes, next month. I’ll try it.”  And then they wouldn’t.  It saddened me to see all these people, chained to their online lives, posting flattering  photos of themselves, “liking” a funny status update, posting or retweeting a link. It’s a never-ending race to remind others that we’re here, that we exist.  It reminds me of when I used to do dance routines and little plays for my mom.  “Look!”  I’d yell every few seconds.  “You’re NOT watching! Look!”  It gets exhausting.  And it’s not really living.

So here we are.  It’s now past April 1st, and I haven’t ended the detox.  The truth is, I don’t miss the two sites much.   These days, I feel no pull whatsoever toward Twitter, despite the number of fabulous people there.  In my mind, it’s a crowded elevator where everyone’s talking over one another.  They’re all saying interesting things, but who can keep track?  Part of me is afraid to return to Facebook. Will it exert the power over me that it used to?  I want to return, and I want to show restraint.  And if I can’t, I will have to detach once again.  That might be fine.  Since January, I’ve enjoyed the injection of mystery and privacy into the world.  I don’t need to broadcast my life on a daily basis.  If I run into you at the grocery store, the question, “How are you?” will be genuine, and that will feel good.

[Image credit: Marcos Zerene]

is a staff writer and contributing editor for The Millions. She is the author of the novella If You're Not Yet Like Me, the New York Times bestselling novel, California, and Woman No. 17. Learn more about her writing classes at writingworkshopsla.com.

In Memoriam Notable Articles

David Foster Wallace 1962-2008

In Memoriam Notable Articles
September 14, 2008 | 5 books mentioned 15 6 min read
I. It seems fitting to begin a reflection on the late David Foster Wallace in a fit of anxiety about reception - about the propensity of words, sentences, personae, to falsify or to be misunderstood. For example: I know this seems fraudulent and fanciful and like the scratching of some deep narcissistic itch, to write publicly about a famous person's death. And also: I want you to know I know, and to make sure you know I want you to know I know, so that you don't mistake me for someone less intelligent, original, precise, and self-critical than I am. Because I am terrified of the ethical misstep, of solipsism, and above all of getting things wrong. So, I think, was my subject, for whom the vicious regress sketched above could go on infinitely, each new confession forcing a confession about the rhetoric behind that confession. Indeed, in his later work, as in the short story "Octet," David Foster Wallace found a way to make the regress feel infinite. Some readers saw in this a kind of heroism - a commitment to representing philosophical truth, no matter how ungainly. Others saw it as evidence that Wallace had hit some kind of aesthetic cul-de-sac. Some even saw it as both: a heroic cul-de-sac. But it seems to me that Wallace's manic sincerity was merely the obverse of our age's reflexive irony. Each was an expression of deep suspicion of abstractions like "trust" and "faith." Which makes Wallace's achievement even more impressive. Ultimately, his characters and narrators managed to push beyond paradox and to risk saying something about what used to be called the human condition. In honor of those risks - and with the preliminary apologiae more or less in place - let me try here to risk saying something about David Foster Wallace. II. David Foster Wallace was a large, shaggy, uncomfortable, funny person who once held me and 75 other people hostage for over an hour in a basement room in St. Louis. He was reading from his new book, Brief Interviews With Hideous Men. I was 19, and when the reading was over I squeaked out something like, "Infinite Jest really meant a lot to me," and he said something like, "Do you want me to sign your copy?" and I said something like "I checked it out of the library" and then I ran away. That is, Wallace was a person I did not, in any respectable sense of the word, know, though I am currently feeling a dreadful temptation to pretend otherwise, to insist on a connection between reader and writer, to assert some rights over the body, and over the life, and over the work. Then again, in another sense, I knew him - I did. I heard the critic John Leonard say one time that the great writers, the ones who matter, are "friends of the mind," and David Foster Wallace was mine. Simply put: his work has mattered more to me, and for longer, than any other writer's, and when he killed himself last week at age 46, I felt like I had lost a friend. His voice is still in my head. I came to that voice in high school, when I first read Infinite Jest. This was immediately and not incidentally prior to my discovery of literature per se. I read the thousand-page book more or less continuously for three weeks (as would be my habit every few years) and I felt like someone was speaking to me directly, in my language, about people I knew, or had been. "Like most North Americans of his generation," Wallace wrote, in a passage that hooked me early on, Hal Incandenza tends to know way less about why he feels certain ways about the objects and pursuits he's devoted to than he does about the objects and pursuits themselves. It's hard to say for sure whether this is even exceptionally bad, this tendency.  The secret power of this voice, as Wallace would discover in his essay "Authority and American Usage," lay in its immense ethical appeal. Although his descriptions of Hal's life at a tennis academy, and of pharmaceutical habits or Eschaton, did not stint on arcana, Wallace was perfectly willing to admit that certain things were "hard to say." Moreover, there was the seeming correspondence between the authorial persona and the real person I glimpsed through the interstices of the fiction, and, later, nonfiction. That person was like an extreme caricature of many generational traits: polymathic, ironic, brilliant, damaged, and under intense pressure to perform. The difference was that DFW (as I came to think of him) had performed. Unlike so many of the other great minds of our time, he had made good on his promise, less by virtue of talent than through moral courage and hard work. I still think the elucidation of Gerhard Schtitt's tennis philosophy in Infinite Jest is some of the best writing about writing I've ever read: "How promising you are as a Student of the Game is a function of what you can pay attention to without running away." Wallace somehow managed to pay attention to everything. III. Of course, nothing is so unforgivable in postmodern America as an assertion of one's own value, and in various large and small ways, Wallace's critical reception would be dampened by schadenfreude. The surest way to marginalize the literary high-water-mark of the 1990s would be to exaggerate its (considerable) length and difficulty. "Sure Infinite Jest is great," the logic went, "but does anybody actually read it?" Similarly, I think, it would be both inaccurate and reductive to blame the burden of following up a masterpiece for driving Wallace to his death. In the 10 years that followed Infinite Jest - which might have been a perfectly reasonable gestation period for another long novel - Wallace published five books, for a more than respectable average of one every two years. The short stories "Church Not Made With Hands" and "Good Old Neon," and the essays on the porn industry and John McCain in Consider the Lobster would be among his best work. Furthermore, it was impossible to read about the Depressed Person in "The Depressed Person" and not to understand that the author had known depression on the most wrenching and intimate and long-term terms. The suicide that now hangs shadelike over the Wallace corpus in fact predated it, at least as a potentiality; think of The Sad Stork and Kate Gompert and "Suicide as a Sort of Present" and the narrator of "Good Old Neon." Or don't, because revisiting Wallace's work is liable to offer more questions than answers. E.g.: How can someone with so much going for him have felt so bad? How could such an ambitious communicator have settled for this final muteness? And what, in the end, can we say about it? IV. We can say, first of all, that David Foster Wallace's death is a historic loss for readers. To me, the self-annihilating qualities of "Octet" and "Mister Squishy" and "Oblivion" didn't read as fictional dead-ends, but as attempts to solve, once and for all, the preoccupations of Wallace's youth, prior to some astonishing new novel. And we can remember that that book would have reflected a side of David Foster Wallace his critics didn't often acknowledge: the metaphysician. In retrospect, Wallace's belief in something larger than logic is everywhere: in Schtitt's philosophies, in the prayerful ending of "The View From Mrs. Thompson's," and in "Good Old Neon," where a suicide suggests that "all the infinitely dense and shifting worlds of stuff inside you every moment of your life [turn] out now to be somehow fully open and expressible afterward." Indeed, it offers some solace to recall that Wallace imagined death, in Infinite Jest, as a restoration, a catapult[ing] home over fans and the Convexity's glass palisades at desperate speeds, soaring north, sounding a bell-clear and nearly maternal alarmed call-to-arms in all the world's well-known tongues.  This lovely image of connection posits death as the antithesis of depression, whose cause and effect, as Wallace diagnosed them, was the ontological problem of aloneness. Wallace revisited the proposition again and again, most recently in a soon-to-be-minutely-parsed commencement address at Kenyon College: I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of what your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out.  But on this point, Wallace, who got so much right and saw so much so clearly, fell prey to a junior-grade fallacy, which now deepens into irony. As he himself put it in Infinite Jest: "sometimes words that seem to express really invoke." Even as Wallace's darkest images expressed the anguish of existential solitude, the act of writing fiction, of writing it so well, was itself an invocation of community. His finest creation, Don Gately (the Leopold Bloom of Infinite Jest) bodies forth the possibility of true empathy, and we learn, through a series of hints, that he will try to lead Hal Incandenza out of the prison of the self. Gately's secret? He has come to understand that there is no proof, that some things one simply takes on faith. And as Gately observes, it works. David Foster Wallace's death looks, from where I'm sitting, like a failure of communication. But his life, and his work, are an affirmation of it. Death is not the end.
In Memoriam Notable Articles
| 5 books mentioned 15 6 min read
● ●
Essays Notable Articles

How Will I Live? Fame, Money, Day Jobs, and Fiction Writing.

Essays Notable Articles
April 16, 2015 | 5 books mentioned 15 9 min read
In 1782, the year she turned 30, Frances Burney was a single, successful chick-lit author with not one, but two bestsellers to her name. Fans pointed and stared at her when she went out to public places. They stood up and made a fuss when she entered rooms. They routinely addressed her as “Evelina” or “Cecilia” -- which is sort of like the 18th-century equivalent of going up to Helen Fielding and calling her “Bridget.” She was only 26 when her first novel was published. Reviews were good, sales were even better, and since the book was published anonymously, all of London was scrambling to find out who’d written this delightful romp in which a beautiful if incredibly naïve young woman comes to the big city for the first time, buys some new clothes, and gets swarmed by suitors both true and faux. Once the mystery was solved -- once everyone figured out that this year’s It Novel, Evelina: Or, the History of a Young Lady’s Entrance Into the World, had been written by the relatively uneducated middle-class daughter of a music teacher -- Fanny began living the dream. Suddenly, she was A-list, awash in cool parties and blind script deals. In January of 1779, Richard Brinsley Sheridan – essentially the Judd Apatow of his time -- encouraged her to write a comedy, agreeing that he would take any play of hers sight unseen for the Drury Lane. And she wasn’t just a one-book wonder. The day before her 30th birthday, she published her second novel -- Cecilia: Or, Memoirs of an Heiress -- in which another beautiful if incredibly naïve young woman comes to the big city for the first time, buys some new clothes, and gets swarmed by suitors both true and faux. Teeming with parties, socialites, new hats, degenerate gamblers, and languid metrosexuals, Cecilia was twice as long as Fanny’s first book, three times more complicated, and -- much to everyone’s surprise -- it was an even bigger and more spectacular commercial success. Everywhere Fanny went that year, people wanted to talk to her about it. Princesses were reading it. Dowager duchesses. Milliners. Bishops. Members of Parliament. In October of 1782, while she was in Brighton with her BFF Hester Thrale, as relayed in Margaret Anne Doody’s biography Frances Burney, she wrote to her favorite sister, Susanna: You would suppose me something dropt from the Skies. Even if Richardson or Fielding could rise from the Grave, I should bid fair for supplanting them in the popular Eye, for being a fair female, I am accounted quelque chose extraordinaire. And she was. She was something extraordinary. At that particular point in world history -- since Jane Austen was only 7 years old -- she was the most successful female novelist currently alive on the planet. But of course her glittering fame and success didn’t last. Eight years later, by December of 1790, she was wasting away and near death from some nonspecific “feverish illness” of the sort spinsters were particularly wont to get back then. Opium was prescribed. And, as Burney noted in her Journals and Letters, “three glasses of wine in the day.” She was still writing, but she was writing blank-verse tragedies with exhausting and ridiculous titles like Edwy and Elvira. And it’s not like people were lining up to read these blank-verse tragedies. So what happened in those eight missing years to make a well-reviewed, commercially successful author fall so far so fast? Heartbreak? Rehab? Addiction to designer shoes? Easy. She took the wrong day job. There’s been a flutter of articles in the past several months on the sheer impossibility of earning a living wage from writing fiction. This is a quandary that plagues all artists: male, female, old, young. In L.A., where many writers are union-repped and writing for a screen of some sort, real numbers are bandied about quite bluntly ­-- both in conversation and on Deadline Hollywood -- but in the more refined sectors of the print economy, the main question no one wants to ask but everyone wants answered is quite simple: How are you supporting yourself? Is there a husband? A day job? A trust fund? If you write literary fiction, do you teach? If you’re in your 20s, do your parents pay your rent? At the end of March, The New York Times Book Review took on the subject in its Bookends column, asking, “Do money woes spur creativity, or do they stifle it?” Back in January, the novelist Ann Bauer wrote a piece in Salon owning up to the fact that her solution is a husband with good money and medical benefits. In December, Nell Zink addressed the question in the Paris Review blog and came down firmly in favor of nonliterary day jobs: “My main concern was always to have a job that didn’t require me to write or think.” Also in December, Liz Entman Harper published a roundtable in The Morning News in which she gathered seven writers who “have to keep one foot firmly outside of the literary world to get by.” Old standbys like teaching and journalism were represented, but other participants included a lawyer, a professor of psychiatry, a full-time United Methodist pastor, and a private investigator. They commiserated on the stresses and strain of working two shifts, but also pointed out the occasional benefits of cross-pollination between “jobby-job” and writing. One even posited that actually liking your job may be the secret sauce that makes the whole thing work. In the words of Christine Montross, “If you’re in a job that you hate and that drains you, I imagine it would be harder to find the energy or stamina to write in the off hours.” Which brings me back to my 18th-century case in point. The year was 1786. England’s most successful female novelist was 34 and unmarried. Lacking a Hollywood shark of an agent, she had sold her first novel outright for £20. Her father, a successful author in his own right, negotiated for her on her second, and it went for much higher -- £250. But plays were how writers made real money back then, and the comedy Fanny wrote at Sheridan’s behest was never produced because her father/agent got cold feet about the impropriety of a lady writing for the stage. The cruel irony of this is that in the Downton Abbey sense of the word, Fanny wasn’t a lady. Her father wasn’t a gentlweman who lived off earned family income. He worked for a living -- teaching music to society girls and writing -- and so when Fanny’s fame and a friend’s connection brought her the “honor” of a royal appointment as Second Keeper of the Robes in the court of Queen Charlotte, it was virtually impossible for her to say no to the income and prestige it would bring her family. The plus of Fanny’s unusual day job -- at least by the Nell Zink standard -- was that it didn’t require her to think or write. And it came with a place to stay -- an actual palace/castle. But it was poorly chosen because Burney hated it and the hours were insanely long: roughly 6am to midnight, day in and day out. Sure, there was health care -- smelling salts, “the bark,” etc -- but no vacation days, no weekends off. Nothing to do while the King was going mad. Because, you know, back then it wasn’t considered appropriate to start composing your tell-all memoir while you were still on the celebrity payroll. Arguably, the money was a draw. Two hundred a year, plus a footman and a maid. The servants make this difficult to calculate in modern-day dollars, although in Jane Austen dollars it’s not enough to marry on. I suspect that it was good not great -- probably something vaguely comparable to what I used to make back in the late '90s when I was a struggling, 20-something Hollywood assistant who accidentally stumbled upon the Everyman’s Library edition of The Diary of Fanny Burney in the stacks of the Beverly Hills Public Library. At the time, I had just moved from Chicago to L.A. with two suitcases and half a Seinfeld spec, and virtually all of my non-working hours were spent obsessing on my career prospects. Would I still be answering the phone at 30? Would I ever be able to make the leap from beleaguered, put-upon Hollywood assistant to beleaguered, put-upon Hollywood writer? Having read two of Burney’s novels as an English major at Columbia, I knew a little about her life and work, but that fateful day when I stumbled upon her diary, I didn’t see it as an artifact from a bygone era. I simply thought to myself, “Here is someone who has also tried to be a writer. I wonder how things worked out for her.” And of course in the most basic way ­-- the way that mattered most to me at 27 -- they worked out spectacularly well: Frances Burney had the exact kind of success most 20-something writers crave -- i.e., the kind where you are singled out as a force to be reckoned with before you are 30. But then what? At 30, Jane Austen was an utter failure. A blocked writer with virtually no income of her own, she was living at her brother Frank’s house in Southampton with his new bride, her widowed mother, her older sister Cassandra, and an equally impoverished family friend. When she was 21, her father had queried a publisher about the first draft of Pride and Prejudice -- then called First Impressions -- but they refused to read it. At 27, she sold her novel Northanger Abbey, expecting this to launch her writing career -- but her joy was short-lived: the publisher advertised the book but never put it out. The year before she had been offered a very tempting, well-paid day job -- the job of being Mrs. Harris Bigg-Withers -- but she couldn’t bring herself to accept. Either because she didn’t love the man -- or because in the era before birth control that particular day job was incompatible with writing. She was 33 when it finally happened, the blessed event that would be the making of Jane Austen as a writer. It wasn’t a burst of literary inspiration -- a plot, a character, her invention of a newfangled free indirect style. It was a piece of real estate -- a house provided rent-free by her brother Edward. In the summer of 1809, after eight years of peripatetic living arrangements that were unproductive for her writing, Jane Austen settled down in this house and began to rewrite and revise the manuscripts of her younger years into the masterworks we know today as Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility. For her, there was no waking up at 6am to help the Queen get dressed. And Frances Burney? After five years of her disastrous, soul-crushing day job -- after five years of walking backwards and answering to a bell -- the glittering young author who had once been compared to Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding and deemed “quelque chose extraordinaire” was no longer quite so extraordinary. She eventually rallied and made a comeback with her third novel, but her fourth is practically unreadable, and, as a fan, I can’t help but wonder what book Burney would have written in her mid-30s if she hadn’t taken that awful day job. Would she have found a way to hone her craft, perfect her talent for dialogue, and achieve the sort of literary immortality achieved one generation later by a clergyman’s daughter named Jane? Writers have always asked this question: how will I live? And the answers have never been easy. In October of 1790, Frances Burney was leaving St. George’s chapel at Windsor Castle when she ran into an old friend who was also a writer. James Boswell urged her to return to writing, posthaste. “I am extremely glad to see you,” Burney reports him saying. ”But very sorry to see you here! My dear ma’am, why do you stay? -- it won’t do! ma’am! You must resign!” Eager to hear about another old acquaintance, Burney asked him about Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. “It will come out next week,” Boswell replied. “’Tis the first book in the world! -- except my own!” Bubbling over with excitement about his Life of Johnson, he took a proof sheet out of his pocket to read aloud to her some choice quotes -- but Fanny’s boss was watching at the window and the Queen was approaching from the terrace. She had no choice. Her day job was calling. She had to get back to work. Previously: Working the Double Shift Image Credit: Flickr/Tracy O.
Essays Notable Articles
| 5 books mentioned 15 9 min read
● ● ●
Notable Articles Sport

The Starting Six: On the Remarkable Glory Days of Iowa Girls Basketball

Notable Articles Sport
May 8, 2014 | 5 books mentioned 24 7 min read
Girls basketball was part of the culture. Each spring the TV broadcasts from the capacity crowds at the state’s largest arena in Des Moines took over one of the three stations our antenna received, and it was largely from these games that I learned the names of small town Iowa: Grundy Center, Montezuma, What Cheer.
Notable Articles Sport
| 5 books mentioned 24 7 min read
● ● ●

61 comments:

  1. Pingback: Social Networking Detox « memoirs on a rainy day

  2. Thanks for that lively article, Edan. After much nervous contemplation about it in the past year, I still haven’t joined either Facebook or Twitter, and now I know that I won’t!

  3. Dropped out for a week thanks to you–it’s been coming for a while, though. I’ve realized that so much of the time that used to go to reading, like over my morning coffee, is now spent on Facebook or other random internet browsing. So we’ll start with a week, then keep going.

  5. Agreed! I deactivated my Twitter and LinkedIn accounts two weeks ago, and am enjoying it. More than just being tired of the banal status updates, I was annoyed at my repetitive, obsessive checking of the Twitter feed. Anonymity and privacy is underrated.

  6. Without FB I’d be stuck obsessively checking the weather and my clean inbox over and over. My addiction is to the entire laptop…it seems to join my every activity lately. I feel this compulsive need to see if the midnight show of KickAss at the ArcLight is selling, to check BoingBoing for new posts, to Google anything and everything. And, like I said, looking up the unchanging weather every 30 minutes or so. Maybe I need to get on the wagon for a bit!

  7. Interestingly, around the same time you did this I fell in love and …fell off twitter for months. I’m even having trouble keeping up my blog. But I do love both Twitter and FB for the capacity to crowd-source things like where to stay and where to eat, and I do feel closer to friends and relatives at a distance—email can be so cumbersome to respond to, whereas the passive connectivity of FB means they feel more like a part of my daily life than they would otherwise.

    Anyway, you’re missed, but I’m glad I get to read you over here.

  8. Pingback: Social Media Detox | Grierson Huffman

  9. I suppose it is no surprise to you that I heard of this article by way of a retweet of a twitter post. That, unfortunately, is the great gaping hole in your plan: without those sites you say you don’t need, there would be no one here to read your thoughts on it. Of course, I agreed with you 100%, but then, that’s the gaping hole in my thinking too.

  10. Pingback: “Personal Reductivism” « Run, Motherfucker, run

  11. @mrG (“Without those sites you say you don’t need, there would be no one here to read your thoughts on it.”) Not necessarily: I’m not on Twitter, and am an infrequent Facebook user (post a comment or update maybe once every 2 weeks) but I came across this article the way I usually do: by checking one of my favorite sites. Which can still become a distraction; but limiting your online media time to a few favorites, at least primarily, sets a sort of boundary to the field – and insures that your screentime will be thought-provoking and not filled with, say, hours of looking at funny cat videos. I agree with Edan: like most pleasures, it’s a question of moderation in the form of self-regulation.

  13. Although social networking has benefited my life as a writer more than it has damaged it, I am trying to keep a balance. I now have one internet-free day a week, and that seems to be working fine. Like everything in life (food, sex, sleep), it’s all about balance.

  15. I agree that it is all about balance. I am a journalist so use twitter as a news feed and to find things I might not normally read (such as this article) – but don’t use it outside work. I have never joined, and will never join Facebook, because I have the old-fashioned idea that you should make an effort to keep in touch with friends you care about.

  16. I really had to laugh at the gravity with which the idea of cutting out Facebook and Twitter for a few months was treated in this article (the “collapse” of the internet, the “strained look” in the eyes of almost everyone the author spoke to about it)—as if it were real deprivation.
    I keep my number of Facebook friends low, and I enjoy reading about their creative accomplishments and inspirations; I’ve learned about new and obscure music, videos and articles; I find out about the best parties and nightclubs that they frequent and/or promote; and I am genuinely happy for the ones who have married and had children and share pictures of their loved ones.
    I’m not addicted to Facebook nor Twitter, but I appreciate it for what it is: it’s a celebration of the moments we want to share.
    It’s fine as long as you don’t let it siphon off your valuable time to the point that you need to go cold turkey to remember that it should enhance your social life, not substitute for it. But such is the sad, empty world of the technologically privileged, I suppose.

  17. I am probably at the old end of the demographic here. I am 67. I’ve certainly had my share of addictions (some took years of active overcoming), not-constructive distractions or abused distractions in my life. But now, now, I am so care-taking of my time. TV is gone, movies are here and I make them count. Will my eyesight hold up? I am hoping to live to 90 and take very good care. The Millions “manifesto” struck a chord–not wasting time on vapid (other adjectives also) when I could be reading insightful. I do enjoy some light reading–the last few years the Scandinavian mystery writers fill that niche. So Edan, I think it’s a good thing. Not to presume on how you should do it–but maybe a withdrawal diary? What fills that space, what would you like to fill that space. Rest and remembering are good things to do. Good luck.

  19. Pingback: Laurent Haug’s blog » Blog Archive » How is the internet shaping us?

  20. Lovely article/post. Re. “If I run into you at the grocery store, the question, “How are you?” will be genuine, and that will feel good” – I can only agree. I enjoy blogging (mostly) though have so far avoided Facebook and Twitter and am fairly sure I’ll continue to avoid it – I like your analogy that it’s like a crowded elevator and everyone is talking over each other. I don’t like crowds or elevators, so that rights me off. For me, despite the undoubted benefits to having an on-line life, social media is essentially, if not necessarily, shallow and vacuous. A hello in a grocery store is so much more meaningful and, dare I say it, profound.

  21. Pingback: Glimmers of a social media backlash? « Ask Spike

  22. I quit facebook during the month of February and it was hard, especially at first. In the month that I’ve been back, I’ve realized the key my fb portion control: I check in a few times a day and see what my friends are up to but I typically don’t post status updates myself now. I might once a week because when I do then I find myself obsessively wondering if anyone has liked what I wrote or responded at all. I guess others posts feel genuine to me but my own posts feel like the “LOOKIT” thing you described so well.

    (an old Peanuts cartoon has Charlie Brown yelling at the red haired girl, “I’M LOOKITING!!”)

    Thanks for a great article.

  23. Pingback: So I’ve disconnected. Sorta. « Monika Fabian
  24. Pingback: Schluss mit Social Media ‹ dreitehabee
  25. Pingback: more awesome web forage « menachemkaiser

  26. Don’t go back. I quit Facebook last fall. Best decision I made in a while. There are much better timesinks, ones that don’t drain every second of your attention while not really providing anything real.

  27. Pingback: Friday Links « 800 CEO Read
  28. Pingback: Weekend Reading - ProfHacker.com

  29. Has anyone successfully used FB or Twitter for business? Any good stories?

    I have hundreds of people on FB and over 1000 following on Twitter. The exchanges can be entertaining but I have yet to derive anything meaningful from it.

    When I first got on FB, I used it to see how my old girlfriends compared. Once that little game was over it went back to the typical 3 round e-mail exchanges to catch up on decades of lost time with friends. Now there is a small core of 20+ people that I keep in constant contact with. About the same before FB.

    I do not feel the need to put up pictures of my kids, quite frankly it scares me. Also, it is very interesting to see how others boast about every little trip or thing they buy. Updating your status to tell me you just “put down new hard wood floors” is not why I joined a social media network.

    There is a value to social media networks but you spend so much time cutting through the noise it almost works against you.

  30. I deleted my twitter and facebook accounts around the same time, in January, and called it social media suicide. I had heard about the suicide sites, but by the time I got on them, they had already been blocked by twitter and facebook. So I deleted all entries, friends, photos, by hand. It was hard. Hard to see all of that love and attention go away. But I did it, because
    I knew I was addicted. And
    I don’t want facebook and twitter to have the rights to my information.
    And I don’t want to spend all of my time on there. I realized that I was in a certain mood when i would check facebook and twitter, the mood of “doing something half-heartedly” or “wanting to waste time.”

    Since I got off these sites, I’ve written 40,000 words of my book, 35,000 words on my blog, created an e-newsletter or three, created 6 new paintings, started writing letters to my relatives (which has brought me such joy) created an ebook about how to get more freelance clients, made 10 slideshow presentations to help people find jobs or fundraise better, and started making an online game to teach people how to fundraise. I’ve made three websites too. And I’ve progressed towards my dream of selling iced tea to people in Austin Texas.

    I have gotten so much done, and I feel like a better person for having committed facebook suicide. I encourage anyone who wants to have a greater impact on the world to do it.

    Mazarine
    http://wildwomanfundraising.com

    Full disclosure:
    I have made a new, professional twitter account that I check once a day, during the week, to post my new blog entry.

  31. I often forget about Facebook for a few days at a time and spend no more than a combined total of a half hour a day or so on Twitter, and I enjoy both places. I do sometimes think about deleting from both sites, though — or, more to the point: I sometimes wish I had the luxury of deleting from both places.

    But if you’re promoting a book, deleting your social media accounts is a terrible idea. I’ve booked a lot of events via Twitter contacts, and I don’t like to think of how few people would come to my readings if I weren’t constantly talking to readers and broadcasting my events on these sites.

  32. Pingback: On self-branding and being a tool « the uff da! chronicles

  33. Facebook is annoying. I have been on Facebook for over a year and it is ok. Great way to share family photos and stories. The key is to keep your network small and easy to manage. Once you let in people you do not know, you are subject to pointless ads and stories.

    Facebook is about “ME”. Most people cannot handle seeing a low number on their account so they end up being friends with anyone to get a cool looking popular number. I find most of the information worthless. Farmville, Mob Wars etc.. etc…

    The internet is young but I expect a facebook killer application to come along soon. Also, Facebook is upsetting people with its privacy rights. If you want to keep anything safe and secure, just keep it off the internet. Sad but true.

  34. This article is fantastic!!! Thank you for sharing your detox experience. One thing I think about, on top of these issues you brought up, is the way that reading other people’s blogs affects my own creativity. I’m a writer and photographer, and while I often claim to follow other artists blogs in order to find inspiration, I often leave feeling insecure and left out of the internet loop of artists. I’m sure some of this has to do with my own personal issues of insecurity, but as soon as I mention this to fellow bloggers, I’m immediately met with resounding agreement and similar frustration.

    While I do often find inspiration from fellow online artists, I often end up recreating the things they have produced. I, as well, want to read and exercise restraint. Perhaps I’m headed to my own detox, of the RSS variety. Who knows…It might end up clearing out my head a bit and allowing me to produce something original.

  35. Pingback: Do Twitter & Facebook help or hinder your writing? « The Traveling Writer

  37. Thank you, everyone, for your comments. Getting all this feedback means I never have to return to Facebook or Twitter ever again. I exist!

  38. Pingback: Whoosh! « Prickly Pear Bloom

  39. I’ve done the same thing last week, in part to Nicholas Carr’s blog and MGMT’s new song “Flash Delirium” which encourages you to “stab your Facebook”. I only wish more of my friends and family would join me in the real world, but like you said, they all make the same damn excuses.

  40. Loved the article, Edan. I feel some of the same pressures — or rather, all of them. The noise online is deafening, and my contribution to it, at least, is ego-based. My detox starts on July 3rd when I leave on the tour. But I’m trying to take it a step further. No Twitter or Facebook, but no computers or television, either. Just books and thinking. And bicycles.

  41. Pingback: Monday Medley « No Pun Intended
  42. Pingback: I Post, Therefore I Am | Tracks
  43. Pingback: [no. 13] Being alone… | A Sunflower…
  44. Pingback: Near Earth Object
  45. Pingback: Measurements : Near Earth Object

  46. Excellent article! I have been doing a bit of hand-wringing over the last few weeks about reducing my online activities and presence. Your well-written piece provides all the intellectual, and quasi-emotional, support I need to flip the switch into the off position.

    One question, though. Did you inform friends and “followers” of your impending departure or did you just leave?

    Cheers!

  47. Pingback: Trends I’m Watching in 2010 | Mediathink
  49. Pingback: Trends I'm Watching in 2010 | Mediathink
  50. Pingback: 4 Monate von Facebook und Twitter abgekapselt ‹ dreitehabee
  51. Pingback: Interview: Edan Lepucki | Full-Stop.net
  52. Pingback: Weekend Reading - ProfHacker - The Chronicle of Higher Education
  53. Pingback: 4 Monate von Facebook und Twitter abgekapselt | dreitehabee
  54. Pingback: The Social Media Detox Smoothie - The GoodFun Foodie
  55. Pingback: change is hard, except when it’s GREAT | The Semioptician
  56. Pingback: Clearing out the attic | Mouseblossom
  57. Pingback: Connettersi meglio | Mac Blog
  58. Pingback: 4 Monate von Facebook und Twitter abgekapselt - mkln.org
  59. Pingback: 4 Monate von Facebook und Twitter abgekapselt - mkln.org
  60. Pingback: Cupertino, We Have A Problem - AdPulp

  61. I’ve been off FB since July 1 and guess what I’ve been doing? Reading voraciously…like I used to before SM took over my life (including your book, Edan! Which was incredibly compelling). Anyway, I miss it the way I might miss being at a great party but not enough to go back. I deleted my account and the people who love me and are my friends are still in my life. In fact, we talk on the phone and share our real lives. I don’t know if you are still “off” but I’m thinking about leaving Twitter too. Merry Christmas!

Add Your Comment:

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Essays Notable Articles

This Chart Is a Lonely Hunter: The Narrative Eros of the Infographic

Essays Notable Articles
February 7, 2012 | 5 books mentioned 24 16 min read
We’ve given today’s visual storytellers considerable power: for better or worse, they are the new meaning-makers, the priests of shorthand synthesis. We’re dependent on these priests to scrutinize, bundle, and produce beautiful information for us so that we can have our little infogasm and then retweet the information to our friends.
Essays Notable Articles
| 5 books mentioned 24 16 min read
Lists Notable Articles

The Most Anticipated Books of 2006 – Part 2

Lists Notable Articles
June 20, 2006 | 5 books mentioned 7 2 min read
Back in January, I took a look at some of the "most anticipated" books of the year. Well, those books are old news now, but there are some great-looking books on the way. September and October in particular are looking pretty stacked. Please share any relevant links or books I may have missed.July:Gallatin Canyon by Thomas McGuane (New Yorker interview)Talk Talk by T.C. Boyle (Boyle's blog)The Driftless Area by Tom Drury (Drury's story "Path Lights")The Black Book by Orhan Pamuk (a new translation, thanks Bud)America's Report Card by John McNally (Thanks Dan)The Judas Field by Howard Bahr (Thanks J.D.)August:Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman by Haruki Murakami (list of stories)Winter's Bone by Daniel Woodrell (Thanks Dan)Brief Encounters with Che Guevara by Ben Fountain (thanks Stephan)September:Moral Disorder by Margaret AtwoodThe Dissident by Nell Freudenberger (Her first novel; following up her collection, Lucky Girls)All Aunt Hagar's Children by Edward P. Jones (very excited about this one - the title story appeared in the New Yorker.)A Spot of Bother by Mark Haddon (a first look at the book)The Road by Cormac Mccarthy (a first look)After This by Alice McDermott (PW Review [scroll down])Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (thanks Dan)Smonk by Tom Franklin (thanks Dan)Dead in Desemboque by Eddy Arellano (Thanks Laurie)October:One Good Turn by Kate Atkinson (sequel to Case Histories)What is the What by Dave Eggers (based on a true story, excerpted in The Believer - Part 1, 2, 3)Lay of the Land by Richard Ford (The third Frank Bascombe novel - I wrote about it last year.)Thirteen Moons by Charles Frazier (A big enough deal that the announcement of a publication date came as an Entertainment Weekly exclusive.)Restless by William Boyd (A World War II novel)The Uses of Enchantment by Heidi JulavitsGolem Song by Marc Estrin (thanks Dan)The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories by Susanna Clarke (Thanks Laurie)November:The View from Castle Rock by Alice Munro (The title story was in the New Yorker)Soon the Rest Will Fall by Peter Plate (Thanks Laurie)The Jennifer Morgue by Charles Stross (Thanks Laurie)December:Untitled Thomas Pynchon novel (as confirmed by Ed.)January 2007:Zoli by Colum McCannFlora Segunda by Ysabeau Wilce (Thanks Laurie)February 2007:Knots by Nuruddin Farah (based on "Farah's own recent efforts to reclaim his family's property in Mogadishu, and his experiences trying to negotiate peace among the city's warlords.")May 2007:The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon (Posts about the book: 1, 2, 3, 4)Addenda: Books suggested in the comments are being added above.
Lists Notable Articles
| 5 books mentioned 7 2 min read
Essays Notable Articles

Obama and the Faulkner Quote

Essays Notable Articles
March 18, 2008 | 5 books mentioned 3 2 min read
Barack Obama gave a speech today taking on the complicated history of racial relations in America. Considering the how difficult a topic this is to tackle, it was a brave move. Embedded within the speech was a quote from Faulkner, "The past isn't dead and buried. In fact, it isn't even past."Andrew Sullivan at The Atlantic ran a letter from a reader explaining why "what Obama was signaling - that his speech - and his candidacy - are about confronting history from a Faulknerian standpoint was, to me, the bravest thing he did."This famous Faulkner quote was spoken by Gavin Stevens, "the intellectual, philosophical, and deucedly clever county attorney," according to one reviewer at the time. Stevens turns up in several works by Faulkner, including the "Snopes trilogy" (The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion) and stories collected in Go Down, Moses and Knight's Gambit.Obama got the spirit of the quote right, though not quite the wording. It's actually simpler and more stark: "The past is never dead. It's not even past," and it refers to the way in which history seemed to haunt Southerners. The quote is taken from Faulkner's Requiem for a Nun, a book that is part prose and part play, a sequel to Sanctuary, and generally not considered one of Faulkner's best works.Obama meant the quote in a sense that captures the spirit of Faulkner's South, that the legacy of our country's racial history is so present all around us that it can't really be considered "past." Interestingly enough, though, the phrase has been borrowed from time to time to refer to the way in which our political campaigns have a way of repeating themselves. In 2004, Robin Toner in the New York Times trotted out a variant of Faulkner's famous line - "The past, in other words, is never really dead in presidential campaigns. It's not even past." - to cap off a column describing how the Republicans used very much the same gameplan in going after John Kerry in 2004 as they did Michael Dukakis in 1988.Perhaps more relevant to the current race was the prominent placement the quote was given by Time magazine's neocon columnist William Kristol about a year ago. His take: "For major political parties, which outlive their individual leaders and partisans, the past is never dead." He went on to posit that the ultimate nominees 2008 campaign would be in the mold of a pair of beloved, departed politicians, Robert Kennedy and Ronald Reagan. It's looking possible that Kristol will be half right in his guess that the RFK legacy will be filled by Obama; Fred Thompson as Reagan reincarnate is looking less prescient, however.These examples, though they arise from a different context entirely, can nonetheless be contrasted with Obama's wielding of Faulkner. In what might be called an echo of the central themes of his candidacy, Obama used the Faulkner quote not in terms of the political reruns that go on cycle after cycle, but in terms of facing up to - and trying to get past - a difficult history.
Essays Notable Articles
| 5 books mentioned 3 2 min read
● ●
● ● ●