A few days ago, I came across the word ‘Tsudonku’. It is a Japanese word that describes the act of buying piles of books, but never reading them. At present I have at least 50 odd books that lay placidly on my desk, waiting for me to read them. Every morning I think about reading, and by every night I fail. Why does that happen? As someone who still likes to call himself a voracious reader, the books I’ve read in the past three years is disappointing. What happened?
In one of my podcast episodes, I talked about how the brain uses mental shortcuts called heuristics to make quick real time decisions. Somehow, our brains have started to use the wrong shortcuts. And they’re doing it far more often than before. I’m assuming that if you’ve subscribed to this newsletter, you more or less like to call yourself a reader. Now try to compare the amount of books you read before and after you got actively involved in social media. The graph is pretty bleak right? It’s not my intention to make the case that social media eats off our time – that’s been established before. What I want to look into are the mechanics of the trade-offs that our brains make.
A scenario
Imagine chilling on an afternoon on your device and suggestion for a 2 hour long documentary pops up. You see the description and are interested in it. Before you think any further, you invariably go back to check all your social media for any updates [dopamine hit]. You see that there’s nothing new, and you go back to the documentary. Now you have to make a decision. You hesitate to watch it. 2 hours looks like a big time commitment. You start thinking about your assignments, and other commitments. “All that work won’t do itself” – you say under your breath and decide to not watch the documentary.
Good decision right?
Do you shut the device off, and start working?
No you don’t. You start watching smaller videos/reels on YouTube/Instagram. “That doesn’t feel like much of a time commitment and I have to anyway start working in the next 15 minutes” you say to yourself. You giggle and laugh at the clips and have a gala time.
Until you look at the clock.
It is 2 hours past your work time.
Insert meme - *Ah shit, here we go again*.
The mechanics of decision making
Your brain has to constantly keep prioritizing and re-prioritizing tasks, and it keeps making trade-offs every second. In this case, the decision of refusing to commit to a 2 hour documentary is a good utilitarian decision because your brain prioritizes your work before your entertainment. However the brain makes this decision assuming that you will actually get off your device and start working. But that never happens. It is true that it is very easy for the mind to get distracted, after all we do not call it a monkey brain for no reason. But that is not only due to a vague sense of not wanting to do work, there are other nuances. It is imperative to compare what constituted distraction and the mechanics of it before and after social media (also while you’re at it, notice the length of time that you remined distracted). A pre-social media distraction would be either to read books, go out to play, talk to friends, or just strolling. Distracting yourself through either of these activities is not very potent i.e. the distraction does not last very long. There’s only so many pages you can read, so many things you can talk about, and so many roads you can walk. And most importantly there’s some amount of active effort required to engage in them, although very less. Inevitably you went to work. Compare these to what constitutes distraction now. You literally have the world in your hands, and all you have to do is the minimal effort of just tapping your fingers on a screen and not falling asleep. There is no dearth of content one can consume. Audio/Visual/Writing - you name it. And even though computationally the content is not infinite, for a human being there is enough content to last him a lifetime. Therefore the distraction traps of social media or other applications constructed around them are more potent and more distracting this time around. Social media signified the quantification of the human experience through likes, shares, upvotes, streams, watch-time etc. The introduction of measurement metric of human feelings and interaction is one of the most impactful design choices ever made by humans. I will not delve too much into this issue as there exists a vast literature of how social media’s metrics of engagement have had an unprecedented adverse affect on us. However, the book 10 Arguments for deleting your social media is an excellent read by Jason Lanier, the man often called the Silicon Valley’s conscience.
This distinction in distraction tools is important to be kept in mind. The decision of not consuming long form media is against large time investment and not against investing time in a particular form of media. This is exactly why we’re no longer consuming most of long-form media i.e. books, films, podcasts etc. It’s is not just about long podcasts, it is also about long documentaries, long interviews and all those long seminars you never ended up watching even after saving them.
A case study
Every time you come across any long form media now, something of this sort happens:
*Finds a great documentary/podcast/book*
Brain – “Hey dumbass, you don’t have time to consume all of it! This video/podcast is around 3 hours long, and your assignments won’t do themselves you know”
You – “But I really want to consume it, it really seems interesting. What if I at least started now and then watch the rest later?”
Brain – “Dude, do you have no taste? Such long-forms are meant to be consumed in one sitting, there’s a reason it’s not 6 bits of 30 minutes each/ just a 50 page book. What’s the point of consuming it now when you don’t even know when you’ll be back to continue. This will ruin the whole experience”.
You – “Well, you make sense. Guess it’s a bad time investment, especially because I can’t guarantee continuity due to my hectic work schedule”
Brain – “Finally you’re talking some sense”.
It is exactly at this moment that shit hits the fan.
You – “I still have 10 minutes on my hands, and since I cannot watch a movie/documentary, or listen to a podcast, or read a book because they’re all big time investments, what do I do?”
Brain – “This 5 minute compilation of cute cat videos looks very cool, let’s check this out”
You – “Damn right, cats are the cutest. Here we go”
The End pt. 1
To state the obvious, your brain decided to watch the cat video because it is a short time investment compared to a documentary/podcast and even worse – a book! Makes sense right? This is exactly where the design choices made in aesthetic, bean bag laden conference rooms in Palo Alto starts to shape how we consume and interact with media.
Exhibit 1 - The bottomless scroll.
When you end watching the first video, the algorithm is ready with at least 5 more cute videos. And you really want to watch at least one more. So you do. You reason with yourself, “Maybe, one more after this as well? I mean, I can start a little late as well”. To quote the respected senior advocate Harish Salve, “Will the heavens fall?” if you watch a few more videos and start a little late? And in no time you’re already on your 10th video, and going deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper into the bottomless rabbit hole. And when you look back at your clock –
You – “Dude! What the hell? You’re supposed to TELL ME when to get off”
Brain – “DUDE, THOSE CAT VIDEOS WERE SO GOOD WHAT CAN I DO?”
You – “I just- ………..”
Brain – “Alright, alright. I’ll take care from next time onwards”
The End pt. 2
Epilogue:
This phenomenon is concomitant with very concrete design choices that social media companies like Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Reddit, Tumblr etc. made around that time (roughly 2008-2011). Design choices that make you not only spend more time on their platforms that require only a minimal amount of your commitment and attention, but fundamentally change the way you consume media. I say fundamentally because we do not spend all, or even most of our times on these platforms, so they haven’t stolen ALL of our time from us, have hey? Thus we should still be able to read and consume longform media is the other times, right? What they have done, and that too bloody well I must say – is to convince us of the impossibility of even beginning to consume long-form (Very similar to Mark Fisher’s argument of how Capitalism has restricted our imagination in a way that we cannot imagine any socio-economic world order other than Capitalism). Why would you, when you have a bottomless pit of short videos that trick your brain into consuming them at your disposal 24*7? Why go for the apparent guilt of wasting your time on a 3 hour podcast when you can easily watch YouTube? The brain essentially commits to just one 5 minute video, but because of the nefarious recommendation algorithms and of course our evolutionary biology (that always needs dopamine and oh boy – do cat videos deliver tons of that), the brain ends up re-committing to the other short video as well whilst having the illusion of control – that it will stop after that particular video. But regardless, that doesn’t happen and we end up spending the same or even more time than we would have spent consuming long-from in a pre-social media, long form friendly world.
Is there a way to resolve this dilemma?
I would like to think there is. I refuse to believe that the whole of human condition has irreversibly been corrupted by technology. That’s not to say that the claim cannot be true. It might be, but I don’t want to give in, just yet. So what I have started to do is to be more conscious of every media consumption choice I make. Before clicking on anything, I ask myself, “Is it something I really want to consume? Is there anything else that I’d rather consume? Am I just bored? Can I pick up a book right now? Can I watch a documentary right now?”. These are some questions I sometimes ask myself. This is not to say that I always ask all the questions, all the times. I still make dumb media consumption choices, but as a dear friend said once – ‘Self-awareness is a virtue’. We did not go from reading every day to not reading for years abruptly. It was a process. And thus, the process of reclaiming intellectual space away from the bottomless social media rabbit holes will also a gradual process. Start today and you’ll be better every day post that. As a matter of fact, you’ve actually started on that journey by subscribing to this newsletter! Good going!
The End End.
Jack of All knowledge -
The book(s) I’m currently reading:
Well, I still have not finished the books I mentioned in the last newsletter, but I think I am going to abandon them for now. I will get back to them later. I most probably am going to start reading India’s founding moment by Madhav Khosla. It tells the story of the constitution of a ‘most surprising democracy’. I might write a book review for it over at my legal blog.
The Music I’m currently listening:
It’s the Spotify wrapped time of the year! I was very delighted to receive a playlist of my most streamed songs! And if you use Apple music, we cannot be friends - just saying. I’ve been listening to a lot of different music, but my current favorite album to go back to is Playboi Carti’s album Die Lit.
The podcast(s) I’m currently listening:
Here is a great podcast in which Gautam Bhatia (an Indian legal scholar) talks about Indian constitutionalism, tensions between the government and the Constitution and how the legal imagination of our civil society has expanded due to recent CAA NRC protests. I highly recommend it, irrespective of whether you study law or not. Here’s the episode. If you want to get a sound economic and moral perspective on the perverse assault on human rights that the De-Monetization was, listen to this episode of The Seen And The Unseen. Amit Varma is on conversation with Shruti Rajagopalan (an economist and legal scholar - one of my favorite intellectuals) about the economic and moral costs of the fatal exercise.
Please reach out to me with your reaction, thoughts, suggestions, criticism - anything! I’ll be really happy to receive your feedback. I’m on twitter, and instagram.
That’s it for this edition folks! Hope you liked it.
See you again, soon.
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