They [men of today] have ears only for the noise of the media, which they take to be almost the voice of God. So man becomes fragmented and pathless. To the fragmented the Simple seems monotonous. The monotonous becomes wearisome. Those who are weary find only uniformity. The Simple has fled. Its quiet power is exhausted. [...] The renunciation does not take. The renunciation gives. It gives the inexhaustible power of the Simple. Martin Heidegger, The Field Path
It’s been a couple of weeks since I renounced all access to the Internet and I must admit I enjoyed escaping the noise of the (social) media for the seven days I stayed offline. Although Heidegger couldn’t possibly have anticipated the extent of our wired lives when he wrote The Field Path in 1949, I find this part of his essay to really capture the problems introduced by our dependance on all kinds of electronic gadgets [Note that the German "den Lärm der Apparate" was translated as "the noise of the media," but Apparate could just as well have been translated as gadgets or machines]. So, did my social media fast allow me to return to Heidegger’s ideal of the Simple?
Well, I’m afraid things aren’t quite that… uhm, simple. Social media is a two-way street and by going off the grid for a week, I only removed one party from the equation. As Douglas Rushkoff explained in the PBS documentary Digital Nation, “combatting distraction isn’t as easy as turning off your email program. If you turn off your email program it’s not the software that’s going to complain, it’s the people on the other side: your friends, your boss, your bills.” Even before my fast had officially started, one of my colleagues got wind of it and thinking I had already unplugged for good, contacted my husband via Facebook with a message to relay to me — meaning that the same medium I had vowed to avoid managed to get through to me nonetheless. My fast therefore, started with the rather sobering realization that you really can’t hide from Facebook!
What this example also shows are the expectations tied to our use of digital media. New technologies have granted us near constant access to others and those others in turn have come to expect that access. If I make myself less available, or in the case of my fast, decide to remove all mediated access except for phone calls, I am violating norms of expected behavior. This violation in turn may cause uncertainty and lead others to question my intentions and/or my relationship with them. As Rushkoff noted, others are bound to wonder “Where’s my report? Why haven’t you answered your email? Are you mad at me?” This is probably one of the reasons I felt compelled to announce my fast on all the social media platforms I was getting ready to leave and to add an automated away message to my email accounts.
Announcing my fast on Facebook
Let’s think about this for a second. Tweeting, Facebooking, blogging — those are all things I do for fun and yet, here I am, if not apologizing for my intentional absence, at least prepping my networks for that unusual event. Even in my absence I am trying to manage my public persona – an activity we engage in each time we perform an identity through a tweet, a status update, or a blog post. Ironically, this perpetual performance of identity was the exact activity I was trying to take a break from in first place by going on a social media fast! Of course, I had a choice not to announce my fast. But knowing about the potentially negative consequences of violating other’s expectations on my perceived identity and my relationships with people in my social networks, how attractive was that option really?
I think that one of the first lessons my fast taught me is the same conclusion reached by Rushkoff: that you can’t do this in isolation. Your social networks don’t cease to exist and demand access to you simply because you logged off or decided to shut them out for a week. This doesn’t just mean that we will have a thousand emails to sift through once we reconnect to the Internet, it also means that the self-presentational work we do online is bound to continue even during a fast. After all, what is an automated away message, if not an attempt at managing others’ perceptions of us?
