Digital and media hygiene

I am pretty fed up with the quality and quantity of the information and interactions I tended to encounter day-to-day. Here's how I push back.

What to avoid

To the greatest extent possible, avoid:

• broadcast media such as radio and TV
• the social media accounts of broadcast media
• the websites of broadcast media
• newspapers
• the social media accounts and websites of newspapers
• the mobile phone apps specific to broadcast and press outlets
• websites and social media platforms with algorithmic timelines
• any system which encourages "doom-scrolling"
• websites with excessive pop-ups or advertising
• places such as cafes or waiting rooms if they have intrusive media such as loud radio lyrics

Also avoid:

• smartphone apps more generally
• interactions with organisations which purport to require a mobile phone number
• interactions with organisations which try to send SMS text messages to your number
• interactions with platforms whose Multi-Factor Authentication requires a mobile phone number later used for non-authentication purposes such as notifications or advertising
• places with intrusive advertising
• places where your conversation is digitally recorded and later used for targeting adverts at you, which regrettably may include other people's homes
• bringing your phone or laptop when it's not essential to whatever the point of your journey is, such as shopping or seeing friends

Where there is little practical choice but to use or experience these systems, always voice your objection, and always voice it politely. After all, your objection may indeed be partly shared by those responsibile for the system or premises, or there may be extenuating circumstances of which you are unaware. There are always ways of saying these things.

Ideally, use a different email address for each organisation with which you deal. This lets you observe which of them pass your details on to third parties. That happens, but rarely, and it is rare precisely because people can track who is sharing their email addresses.

Of course, social media or similar might be unavoidable; I joined Twitter literally because it was required by my employer (and I shall say a little bit more about that time below). But I approach it in the role of a producer, not a passive consumer: I'm there to get my message out, not to firehose the drivel channeled to me by engineers that haven't yet been sacked by Jack Dorsey, Elon Musk or whoever.

What is left?

What is recommended above is primarily for people to make a quite substantial reduction in their exposure to low-quality information and other suboptimal uses of one's time and attention, and to systems which reduce one's personal agency. Secondly it is to encourage gentle pushback against encroachments that no-one asked for nor voted for.

Essentially I'm saying ignore most of the "news". Broadly speaking, it's unimportant. In many circles, there is a social stigma associated with not knowing what's going on (in the world of politics, sport, entertainment or whatever). Just ignore it, and in any case, even following the strictures above, there remains:

• newsletters such as those on Substack
• binging series on Netflix (and similar)
• reading a book
• going to the pub or a cafe, without your phone or laptop
• going for a walk, and so on

Damascene conversion

I used to be way too "online". A habit I picked up in the late 1990s when I got an internet connection in my bedroom. I'd long over-used computers - I have been programming recreationally since early childhood. I also played computer games, occasionally to excess.

One afternoon about fifteen years ago I was going and back and forth between the office and the high street. This was at the job which had required me to join Twitter. It was a sunny Saturday afternoon and I'd gone in to pick up my bike from work, and popped out for a sandwich and so on; in so doing, I passed the same house on Noel Road four times, and there was a man I saw through a window each time, sat there playing Windows Solitaire.

He was probably doing that for at least three hours.

Did he have nothing better to do with his life? He was slightly short of retirement age, and must have worked hard to have had that lovely terrace house in a prestigious neighbourhood, a hundred metres from the residence of Boris Johnson. Yet here he was, transfixed, frittering his time away, moving coloured rectangles on a screen in a game of luck with no financial payoff.

I almost said it out loud: "what are you *getting* out of this?". But since that day, those words have been the questions that the voice inside my head has asked *me* whenever I'm wasting time on these kinds of things.