twitter experiment franzen social media life self truth race gender privilege white

i've had no social media things for as long as social media things have existed (no fb, never had a myspace, no twitter, no cell phone, no pintrist, no instagram, and though i have a fictionaut account, i haven't used it in what seems like five years or something, etc) except this blog.  and i'm not old.  or not that old.  at thirty-three, i'm the same age as Jesus when he also denounced social networking because, if i remember scripture correctly, god told him not to use technology just because. for me, this occurred out of a general anxiety about being seen and the simple notion that it feels like, while many of these social media things are about connecting, many of them are also equally about selfing. this, of course, is the same for anything: anything can be about connecting and sharing and getting out of self and anything can be about being a selfish asshole.  i tend to be a selfish asshole, so i try to avoid things that might allow me to play that game a little too much.   and too many things in our culture allow me to play that game a little too much.  and i realize (via twitter) this comes from a place of privilege (i'm white, male, youngish, educated, etc) but that doesn't mean that my experience is less "real" in some way.

over the last year, i became, vaguely and sort of ambivalently, interested in social media b/c, since i've mainly avoided it, i've sometimes deduced a detrimental result caused by my avoidance of social media in really practical terms: i don't have any way to 'promote' a story or article when it comes out; i literally have almost no online connections with other writers, except maybe, vaguely, two people, who are just extremely kind and replied back to an email i sent one time; i've almost constantly felt like an 'outsider' in any online literary world i've tried to engage with (this of course is my own fault and i don't view it as a problem, just a fact, etc).  i don't feel bad about any of this stuff; i'm just saying that, while i kind of hate self-promotion in literature, i also don't judge: it works for some people and some people are maybe comfortable doing it and that's okay.  i'm not, and that's okay, too.  also, i have the intuition, whenever i think about doing something like facebook or whatever, like, Why?  What for?  To say stuff about myself?  And again, maybe this is a privelige thing: maybe if I had grown up poor and a minority, i would feel more like, People need to hear from me.  but instead i feel like, No one needs to hear from me unless they'd really like to (which is why this blog) and also, It's all in the fiction itself.  I realize not everyone thinks/feels this way; i realize this is my own pernicious, self-consciousness about being selfish and self-conscious, but it's also just a way that i keep my world, which means my body and brain, a little less more.  and i think this comes at a good time, because everybody right now, or a lot of people if i don't want to use the hyperbolic parlance of our times, are bashing franzen for being angry at the internet; i don't really care about franzen's article beyond the idea that it's not all that well written and i don't relate to his anger, though i am, often, amazed and awed by the general stupidity of the internet.

so after a relatively long time of avoiding social media, i decided to conduct an experiment, on myself, in which i would join and subject myself to social media for the period of one month.  the control for the experiment was going to be my dog, who, though he has a facebook account, doesn't believe twitter actually exists, but i couldn't convince him to let me track his moods, etc.  so, there is no real control for this experiment, except for my mental and physical condition after the month-long immersion into social media.   i went into this experiment with a hypothesis: that social media is radically detrimental to the well-being of all beings, both animal and human.  like any scientist, i recognized that if i searched hard enough, i would find my hypothesis fulfilled, so, with the help of my wife judging my emotional and physical condition, i was able, to some degree, to attain, if not objectivity concerning my well-being, certainly a less suspicious viewpoint concerning my well-being.  it was a difficult month.  here are the results:

Day 1: thought it would be funny if i began a twitter account and devoted the entire account to tweets explicating that i didn't understand how twitter worked, tweets asking for help on how to tweet, tweets about how to post pictures, how to follow people, and eventually, tweets about the purpose of twitter, which i've written about here.  followed some people.

Day 2: quickly gave up on devoting an entire twitter account to pretending to be a person who doesn't know how to use twitter because, after a day, it was just exhuasting work. felt like I had gone through the entirety of twitter and followed almost everyone in existence on twitter only to discover I was only following about forty people.

Day 3 - 7: tried to do some "actual" tweets.  while doing these actual tweets and letting them go out, like a brief farts that had to be conjured through an act of the will to be expelled into the universe, i sensed, intuitively, then deduced intellectually, that if i was going to tweet more, i was going to talk less in public, because i've always been bad at and unclear about "why" small talk existed.

Day 8: because i was tweeting more, i was talking a lot less, my wife notes, claiming that i had become (already a distant person) even more distant, as though something (probably tweets, she claims) were taking up too much of my mental space.

Day 9 -11: from wife's notes: seems to be trying to find a balance between tweeting and small talking, and also, seems to be attempting to make tweets that would have some real import to the universe, would really change things.  my own feeling during this time was that through making important tweets, possibly i would feel more capable of doing the small amount of small talk that i normally forced myself to do in order to feel, be perceived as, and experience the world as normal.

Day 12: realized, suddenly and via twitter and articles linked through twitter and as mentioned above, my great place of privilege in this life (white, male, youngish, educated) and knew that i actually have a stable and unchanging self (white, male, youngish, educated) and will pretty much forever, further complicating why i was tweeting, because it occurred to me that my tweets probably were, in some way, either delusional (due to the fact that i am white, male, youngish, educated) and/or taking space away from a more important conversation that has to do with either gender or race.  tried to think of some tweets concerning the importance of gender and race, but all i could think of was christian bale/patrick bateman's "morality" speech in American Psycho.

Day 13: from wife's notes: acting a lot less privileged, though still distant, as if he has become an astronaut explorer, searching for himself on some lonely planet.

Day 14-16: it gradually came to me, like a slow-rolled tennis ball from the center of the universe with the answer to life inscribed on it, that i was learning from twitter, mainly things like the fact that i was privileged and that twitter gave people voices and that Facebook and its early incarnation myspace actually allowed individuals (privileged or not), who were once identityless and shapeless and bodyless as the void itself, a sense of identity and unity and strength: a real self.  and while the privileged, like me, often viewed self as a great problem, many needed a self because they had always been selfless, which seemed, somehow, like a great paradox of life, that those who have a self need to lose it, and that those who don't have one, need to make one. thus i realized that twitter was teaching me how the universe operated.

Day 17: read some real stupid shit and "S" key on Macbook started sticking, annoyingly, and felt that the world was somehow against me and the experiment.  wife observes a particularly unpleasant mind state in her notes: seems unstable, visibly hunched and inverted, as though reforming, through a thorough-going delving into self.

Day 18 -21: confused about what to tweet.  didn't tweet for several days.  felt that others had been tweeting their entire lives, phones in hand at birth, and that i was still learning how the device worked.  very discouraged.

Day 23: had my first tweet favorited and felt, without any exaggeration, a great relief, acceptance, and, while not a huge or nearly as mind-altering as previous twitter sessions, still a verifiable acceptance from the larger universe, again confirming that twitter was somehow designed (perhaps without intent and through an accident) to teach us all how to live.

Day 24: stopped following a lot of people.  just couldn't take it.

Day 24 - 27:  suddenly and without warning, all tweets began to seem like the same tweets i had seen before.  intuited, then intellectually understood that, after unfollowing a few people, twitter would no longer reveal things to me.  tweeted something and it felt like nothing.  didn't learn anything.  spent three days trying to understand why i wasn't learning anything.  wife comments: angrier in general after a period of being greatly distant; opinions and judgments concerning almost everything, including potato chips, texture of carpets, types and pitches of dog's barking, raisins, sunlight, various plastics, clouds, types of leaves, the mailman.

Day 28: experiment ends, cannot continue: realize that hypothesis is correct, only in a way i hadn't foreseen: twitter, through teachings about my true, unchanging self, made me a less happy individual as compared to when i was deluded and living in a kind of bubble of pleasantness.  the world, for once, revealed by twitter, was there, in all its horror, reflecting back, in 140 word segments, the being who i have always been but never acknowledged.