Tag Archives: Twitter

Is Social Media Destroying Your Mind?

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Take a moment to question why you’re on social media, what you gain (or lose) from your involvement, and how you can make your life better with or without it.

I’ve been a very active user of social media since around 2006 or 2007. I might have started with MySpace — who can remember back then? — but I definitely jumped on the bandwagon at Twitter and Facebook, spending well over an hour almost every day scrolling through new content, clicking Like and Share and Retweet buttons, and posting content of my own.

Has your focus been stolen?

I cannot say enough good things about Johann Hari’s book, Stolen Focus. It talks about all kinds of things that are distracting us and preventing us from achieving what we want or need to. If, like me, you’ve begun to realize that you’re less productive at home or work or having trouble maintaining relationships with friends and family members, put down your phone and pick up this book.

I preferred Twitter because the people I interacted with there seemed smarter and more dialed into reality. Not that there weren’t good, smart people on Facebook and idiotic assholes on Twitter. There definitely were.

But the difference between Facebook and Twitter — at least in my world — is that most of the Facebook folks were real-world friends and the Twitter folks were strangers. It’s hard to see posts from friends and relatives that clearly indicate their racist, homophobic, white suprematist, or conspiracy theory views. It’s hard to see them lose their minds to manipulative memes that spur hate and anger. It’s hard to realize that they probably aren’t as smart as I’d hoped they were.

And that’s one of the reasons I dumped Facebook a few years ago — the other being the realization that the algorithm was feeding me crap and preventing my posts from being displayed to friends and followers — and haven’t looked back.

I’m on the verge of fully stepping away from Twitter now. It has become a hate-filled cesspool so full of paid-for misinformation and random advertising that I honestly don’t know how folks can still visit it regularly. Elon Musk has revealed to the world what an absolutely crappy businessman he is, first by overpaying for Twitter and then by instituting policies that, little by little, have been alienating long-time users to the point that they’re leaving in droves.

The writing on the wall for me was Musk’s changing of the verified checkmark, which always indicated that an account had been verified to be what it said it was, to be some sort of revenue generating badge. What I quickly came to learn when I was stripped of my blue check was that anyone who now had a blue check had paid to get it and obviously had some sort of revenue generating agenda that made all of their tweets questionable.

In the 15 years I’d been a Twitter user, it had changed dramatically. I stepped away in November 2022, shifting my focus on Mastodon and the Fediverse for my social networking needs. I’m now in the process of deleting my 147,000 (not a typo) tweets and may even permanently delete my Twitter account.

Avoiding the Mind-Rotting Crap on Social Media

But is Mastodon any better? I can argue that it is, mostly because there’s no algorithm to manipulate and no ads to distract.

But I think the main reason Mastodon has been a breath of fresh air for me is the simple fact that I absolutely refuse to be dragged into any discussions about topics that generate a negative emotional response. Those include (but are not limited to) politics, climate change, gender issues, and race issues. Of course, all of those fall under the broad umbrella of politics in the U.S. because everything in this country of idiots has been politicized.

How do I avoid these topics? By setting up filters that prevent toots with specific key words from appearing in my feed. By not following — or sometimes even muting or blocking — accounts that toot or boost about these topics.

Poll
I put this poll on Mastodon mostly to help people realize how dumb it was to post political stuff. I didn’t expect many votes and didn’t get many. I was just hoping it would get boosted and seen and thought about a lot more. People need to wake the hell up and realize how they’re being played.

And that’s the problem these days. People spend too much time spreading information that supports their opinions on these matters. They don’t care if the information is true or false or some mixture of the two. They don’t care if it generates hate or anger — in fact, I believe they want it to do just that. Make us angry, make us hate the “other side.” Make us want to share the same crap and perpetuate the same anger and hate.

People who share this don’t seem the care — or maybe even realize — that they’re pushing the Us vs. Them mentality that keeps Americans divided and easy to conquer by power-hungry politicians and the corporate lobbyists who feed them in return for subsidies and favors. They’re playing right into the hands of the people who are destroying us for their own benefit.

And I won’t be a part of it.

Social Media is Not My News Source

And no, I’m not living with my head in the sand. I am probably more aware of what’s going on in the world than the idiot who gets all of his or her information from social media.

I listen to two news brief podcasts every morning — First Up on NPR and The Seven from the Washington Post — that give me the headlines and a little more; I follow up when I want to by visiting reputable news sites. I follow news, not opinion — I don’t need someone to think for me. I can think for myself. I suspect that most Americans can’t anymore. Our education system no longer teaches us how.

Is Social Media Destroying Your Mind?

But do we really need social networking? Do we really need to communicate with strangers online?

I can argue either way, but I will say this: face to face relationships with other people are far better for us than communicating with often anonymized strangers in the ether. Knowing this has pushed me into being more socially active after Covid and my crazy travel schedule pushed me into an ever more hermit-like existence.

I live alone and work mostly at home, so I don’t get the kind of interaction during the day that most folks have. I lean on social media for content by others to stimulate my mind and get me thinking about things I normally wouldn’t think about. I build relationships with some of these people. They are, for the most part, my only option when I’m home. And they’re a plausible option for anyone in a similar situation.

The danger is when we let these people think for us or sway our opinions or get into our heads to the point where they’re manipulating our emotions.

If you spend a lot of time on social media, why not take a few moments to think about its affect on you? Put aside your phone and other distractions, take out a sheet of paper and a pen, and honestly answer the following questions:

  • Why am I on social media? What does it do to benefit me?
  • Do I use social media as an escape from what’s going on around me?
  • Does my social media activity make me happy? What about it makes me happy?
  • Does my social media activity make me angry? What about it makes me angry?
  • Do I learn anything on social media? Am I certain that what I learned is true?
  • Why do people I follow share what they do? What are their intentions?
  • Why do I share what I do on social media? What are my intentions?
  • Am I building relationships with the people I meet on social media?
  • Am I seeing what I want to see on social media?
  • How much time do I spend, on average, every day on social media? Is it time well spent or would some or all of that time be better spent doing something else?
  • Am I neglecting responsibilities because social media is taking up too much of my time?
  • What can I do to make social media more fulfilling or useful?
  • What can I do to make social media take up less of my time?

I did say to answer those honestly, right? This isn’t something anyone else will ever see. Be honest with yourself. There are no right or wrong answers. Hopefully, the answers you come up with will help you understand how your use of social media affects you and how you can make it better.

Time Wasted

I wish that I could somehow get back all the time I spent doomscrolling on Twitter and Facebook — especially Facebook, since for about two years it really sucked me in hard. There was a time when every idle moment was spent with my phone in my hand trying to see what was going on in an online world that was prioritized by computers for the sheer purpose of keeping us coming back for more.

But I can’t.

These days, I see myself leaning on Mastodon the same way. I enjoy my experience there more because of the way I’ve fine-tuned it and because of the people I’ve met. But I’ve come to realize that it, like Twitter and Facebook, are sucking away my time, making me less productive. So I’m going to dial back a bit, limiting access to specific times of the morning and evening. Time is limited and I simply can’t afford to waste it on things that don’t matter.

Can you?

The Joys of Social Media

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My ever-changing take on social networking.

I’ve been thinking a lot about socialization these days and I thought I’d say a few things about how I stay in touch with friends (and strangers) while living a relatively solitary life.

Twitter and Mastodon (and Facebook)

I’ve been on Twitter since April 2007 and have tweeted more than 147,000 times. (I have a lot to say.) I’ve always liked Twitter since it filled a gap in my working life. In the years when I worked from home writing computer how-to books and articles and video training materials, I had no social interaction with co-workers. Twitter became my “water cooler” — the place I’d go when I needed a short break from work and some interaction with other people.


I don’t tolerate bullshit. I block all trolls and assholes and mute all advertisers.

Twitter changed over the years, of course. It was weaponized by political parties and states through the use of misinformation, bots, and trolls. I kept ahead of most of this by simply blocking the accounts I didn’t want to see. I’d also mute accounts that promoted their tweets. And I curated my timeline by being very careful who I followed and unfollowing people who tweeted or retweeted a lot of crap. Still, doomscrollling became a thing, even in my carefully curated timeline.

Of course, in recent days, after the takeover by Elon Musk, Space Karen, Twitter has pretty much gone to hell. It started with the new policy that allowed users to buy a Verified tag for their account and the rampant impersonation of real people and companies. Some are funny, some aren’t. One impersonation cost Eli Lilly (and Twitter) millions of dollars. Then there was the return of hate speech, in force, starting with rampant anti-semitism. That was only made worse with the reactivation of the previously suspended accounts for Donald Trump and Kanye West. Thanks to the loss of more than 75% of its staff, Twitter has become somewhat unreliable and there’s virtually no moderation of content.

Basically, Twitter is flushing itself down the toilet and there’s not much anyone can do about it.

Like a few other folks I know on Twitter, I opened an account on Mastodon (@mlanger@mastodon.world), which is a Twitter-like service made possible by decentralized networked servers. It’s a lot like Twitter was in the early days, but because it’s a bit funky to set up, it’s naturally weeding out the social media idiots most of us don’t want to see anyway. I’ve decided to build my Mastodon experience to be a politics-free, hate-free, anger-free world and I’m doing that by simply not following accounts that toot (instead of tweet) politics, hate, or anger. I’m filtering out posts with topics that I don’t want to see or don’t interest me. I’m muting accounts that post primarily politics. I’m basically building a social networking bubble.

Now before you get all critical about that, try to see it my way. I don’t go on social media to get the news or to learn what’s going on in the world. I listen to NPR and have a subscription to the Washington Post. That’s where I get my news. I have no interest in the stories put out by MSNBC, CNN, Fox News, Mother Jones, or just about any other media outlet so why would I want to read social media tweets that link to them?

What am I on social media for? Well, I mentioned it right at the top of this post: social interaction with other people.

Here’s how I see it: I live alone and don’t go out to a job like most people. My daily social interaction is minimal. In addition to meeting up with friends and neighbors at occasional social gatherings, I’m pretty much limited to text and phone conversations with friends and brief messages on Twitter and Mastodon.

(Don’t talk to me about Facebook. That site will rot your mind — it’s a cesspool of hate and lies. And don’t give me the excuse that it’s the only way to keep up with family and friends. These people don’t have phones and email addresses? The only way you can communicate with them is in a toxic environment where you won’t even see their posts unless the algorithm shows you? The only thing Facebook is good for is finding out how stupid/bigoted/gullible your friends and family really are.)

Now that I’m on Mastodon and building a whole new social media world from scratch, I’m really enjoying meeting people with similar interests — especially those that aren’t trying to sell a product or idea. It really is just like the old days on Twitter. You’d meet someone and hit it off and interact, chatting about things going on in your lives. You’d build friendships. Heck, I’ve met in person at least a dozen of the people I’ve met on Twitter, including the first person I ever followed there, who lives in the UK.

Nebo and the Boating Forums

Now that I’m seriously into boating — as I once was seriously into aviation — I’m making friends in the boating world. There are two main tools I’m using to do that.

Nebo is a boating app that lets you share your boat’s location with others. The idea is that you can keep track of where your boating friends are, show them where you are, and possibly meet other boaters in your area. I used it on my other two boat trips to share each day’s cruise with friends and blog readers. But now that I’m cruising at my own pace and meeting folks along the way, I’m using it to keep track of where they are.

Nebo has a built-in chat feature to get in touch with boaters you find on the app. (There are privacy settings to keep your boat invisible or your information invisible to strangers, in case you’re wondering.) As I prepare to return to my boat very late in the season, I’m trying to connect with other boaters in my area. I’ve successfully chatted with a few, including one couple that has done the Great Loop 33 times.

Because I’m not using Nebo every day (since I’m not currently on the water), I’ve pretty much switched over to texting for my closest boating friends. But I still use Nebo to see where they are. (I can’t wait to get back to them.) And if you’re interested in seeing where my boat is, you can find it here.


I can see that this morning both Pony and Nine Lives are at the Columbus Marina with a bunch of other Loopers on Nebo. La Principessa is heading south on the Tennessee River a bit farther north. I’ll likely catch up with them before we hit the Gulf.

Other sources of social interaction with fellow boaters are the two boating forums I follow:

  • TugNuts is the Ranger Tug/Cutwater boats support forum. It’s a great place to share information about our boats. I scan the new messages every morning and participate in conversations where I have something to add. I also use it to get information when I have a question or problem. For example, I was having a heck of a time getting engine computer data to interface with my chart plotters. I posted about my problem and had two good answers within 24 hours.

  • MTOA is the Marine Trawler Owners Association. Like TugNuts, it’s a great source of information for boaters, but it’s not boat specific. I use it to get more general information about cruising, especially about places to cruise. A list of new posts comes to me in email every morning and I use that to pick out the discussions I might want to see and participate in.

Both of these forums require membership. MTOA requires an annual membership fee. Both forums have resulted in members contacting me directly via e-mail — I allow them to do so — about topics I’ve participated in. I’ve gotten a lot of excellent information and offers for meet ups with other boaters. It’s nice. (And yes, I know I did gripe about some of the old guys in these forums, but they are the exception and not the rule.)

My Point

I guess my point is this: Social networking doesn’t need to be an addictive anger- or hate -inducing doomscrolling mechanism. It can be pleasant and informative. It can be a way to meet people with similar interests and keep in touch with them.

It can be what you want it to be — if you focus on what you do and don’t want to see and take steps to get the content you really want.

—

Featured image by Image by Freepik.

Never Stop Thinking

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I think of an experiment to test a theory.

As I age, I find that my mind often wanders into different directions, normally unbidden. I think it’s because I have very little in the way of distractions in my home: I live alone and I don’t have a TV going all the time. This gives me time to think — and sometimes I think about unusual things.

The Science of Hot Coffee

This morning, I thought about why it was so important for me to warm my coffee cup before brewing coffee into it and why it was equally important to get the metal teaspoon I use to add sugar and stir out of that cup as quickly as possible. It all has to do with temperature: keeping that coffee hot as long as possible so I could enjoy it at my own pace before it got cold.

The warmed coffee cup is pretty obvious — we’ve all had the experience of putting a salad on a dish still hot from the dishwasher. The salad touching the plate isn’t as cold as the salad that isn’t. This is why they chill salad plates (and forks) at good restaurants. It follows that putting something hot into a cold vessel will do the same. I guarantee you’ve experienced this yourself. I know only one other person who takes the time to warm his coffee cup before putting coffee in it.

(And yes, I know a lot of folks don’t give a damn about what they likely consider a minuscule temperature change. But I do.)

But the spoon? Why is it so important for me to remove the spoon quickly?

This morning I thought a little about that. I’d always assumed that the stainless steel teaspoon would act as a heat sink. One end is in the hot coffee and the other is in the relatively cool kitchen. The heat from the coffee would heat up the spoon, which was made of metal — an excellent conductor of heat — and that heat would travel up the spoon handle to its end. The handle, which was constantly being warmed by the coffee would be constantly cooled by room temperature. That heat energy that is lost would have to come from somewhere: the coffee.

This is something I’ve always assumed. It makes sense to me. But this morning, for some reason, I wondered if I was right. And then I came up with an experiment to test my theory.

The Scientific Method


Scientific Method diagram by Wikipedia user Efbrazil used via CC 4.0 license.

I was in fifth grade when I learned about the scientific method. That was a long time ago and, not being a scientist or in any way involved in lab work my entire life, you’d think I’d forget it. But some things just stick with me. I think the scientific method stuck with me because it made sense logically — and I’m definitely a logical thinker.

Don’t worry — I won’t go into the scientific method in detail here. I’ll just focus on this diagram, which shows all steps to the method. The important concept to take away from this is that it starts with a question you might want answered and then goes through the process of coming up with a possible answer (hypothesis) and testing that answer (experiment). If the results (analyzed data) support the hypothesis, you might be done; if they don’t, then you’re definitely not done. In either case, you’d likely explore other hypotheses, going through the process again (and again and again, if necessary) until you either couldn’t get an answer — i.e., the experiment results simply do not support any hypothesis — or you were confident that one of your hypotheses was correct.

When I thought up an experiment to test my theory about a stainless steel teaspoon as a heat sink, I realized I was using the scientific method. In real life — not in a lab, not as a scientist. It was a great example about how some of the stuff we learn in school that we don’t think we’ll ever use in life does become relevant every once in a while.

Want to see the process for my experiment? Here are the first four steps:

  1. Observation/Question – More of a question: does coffee get cold faster if you leave a teaspoon in it?
  2. Research Topic Area – Well, understanding what a heat sink is is probably important to forming a hypothesis.
  3. Hypothesis – Yes, coffee does get cold faster if I leave a stainless steel teaspoon in it than if I don’t. (This would not apply to a plastic teaspoon since plastic is a poorer conductor of heat than metal.)
  4. Experiment – Take two identical cups. Add an equal amount of boiling water to each cup. Put a room temperature teaspoon inside one cup. Take temperature readings every 5 to 10 minutes to see if the one with the teaspoon gets cold faster. (You could expand the experiment to include three cups and put a plastic teaspoon in the third to test the hypotheses that plastic teaspoons would not have an effect.)

That’s as far as I got. I thought up the experiment but I didn’t do it. It simply isn’t that important to me to know, one way or the other, if I’m right. But it might make a nice at-home experiment for home-schooled kids if you happen to know any. Science is important — and heat sinks are a part of our every day life — they’re inside every computer we own.

Why Blog about It?

Why am I blogging about this? Well, I think I surprised myself this morning by my train of thought and where it led me. I wanted to share that with other folks who might find themselves consumed with things that prevent them from thinking for themselves.

All for clicks and likes

Let me take a moment to mention how outside pressures, especially from social media, get people to do things just for clicks and likes. Just this morning, I read another gender reveal tragedy story — too many gender reveals exist solely to impress others with their outrageousness. People are dying because a blog post that went viral has convinced people to make their own viral moment centered around the gender of their unborn child. Are we really that dumb? That 15 minutes of fame can put lives at risk?

This is an extreme, of course, but think about the not-so-smart things you’ve done to impress your friends and others over the years. Those “watch this” moments. Ever think of why you were really doing them? Or what the consequences could have been if what you did backfired? Is it really that important to impress others?

How about impressing yourself instead?

Every day, we’re faced with a barrage of inputs from family, friends, strangers, advertisers, and the news media. Direct conversation, text, and email; social media posts by people with their own agenda; print, audio, and video advertisements on billboards, in magazines, and everywhere online and on television; network and cable news broadcasters. Too much of that input is trying to fill your head with someone else’s thoughts and ideas and manipulate your opinions. If you follow politics at all, you know exactly what I mean. It’s hard to have a moment to yourself, a time to just think based on verifiable facts and to form your own ideas and opinions.

I do this a lot. Yes, I spend a lot too much time on Twitter but that’s the only social media I allow access to my brain. (Seriously folks, #DeleteFacebook.) And even then, I’m careful about who I follow. I don’t want a diet of political nonsense from either side so I tend to avoid accounts that post just politics. Instead, I try to get tweets from fellow thinkers — or at least from folks who have a life that doesn’t revolve around cable news and the latest political/celebrity scandal. And when I’m not on Twitter — which really is most of the time — I keep active and work on ways to make my life fulfilling.

I think therefore I am. If you can’t think for yourself, do you really exist?

Anyway, does leaving a stainless steel teaspoon in your coffee make it cool faster? If you do the experiment, let me know.