In my last post I discussed how I've been keeping busy with reading and piano playing during the past five months of the pandemic. But why did I choose this medium to discuss my thoughts in the first place? Well, it's the only outlet I have. As many of my friends know, I have no social media accounts. At one point in my life I had active accounts with Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and open accounts with Snapchat, Twitter, and TikTok, although the latter three I used rarely, if at all. Facebook was the first to go, and the rest followed in due time.

I was becoming increasingly unhappy with my passive usage of social media. I began to understand this dissatisfaction once I started studying history and became interested in the passage of time. Both the time spent on social media seemed like a vacuum, as did my perception of how time passed for my friends and acquaintances whose lives I only saw for a split second as I scrolled through my feed. One day I was reminded of a scene in Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five which helped me connect the dots.

In this scene, an advanced alien race abducts Billy, the human protagonist. These aliens experience life in four dimensions, unlike us humans who are "three-dimensional." Bear with me. The aliens keep Billy in a zoo and try, unsuccessfully, to describe to their fellow alien visitors how humans perceive time:

"The guide invited the crowd to imagine that they were looking across a desert at a mountain range on a day that was twinkling bright and clean. They could look at a peak or a bird or a cloud, at a stone right in front of them, or even down into a canyon behind them. But among them was this poor Earthling, and his head was encased in a steel sphere which he could never take off. There was only one eyehole through which he could look and welded to that eyehole were six feet of pipe."

To the aliens, who can see time in the fourth dimension, that is to say, all at once, Billy's condition is unfathomable and pitiful. How awful it must be to live at the whim of Time, in all its capriciousness. The guide continues:

"This was only the beginning of Billy's miseries in the metaphor. He was also strapped to a steel lattice which was bolted to a flatcar on rails, and there was no way he could turn his head or touch the pipe. The far end of the pipe rested on a bi-pod which was also bolted to the flatcar. All Billy could see was the dot at the end of the pipe. He didn't know he was on a flatcar, didn't even know there was anything peculiar about his situation. The flatcar sometimes crept, sometimes went extremely fast, often stopped -- went uphill, downhill, around curves, along straightaways. Whatever poor Billy saw through the pipe, he had no choice but to say to himself, 'That's life.'"

We mere humans don't see time as a mountain ahead of us. We see each day through the lens of a microscopic peephole called a moment. We can't control what we see or how long we see it for, and when we try to look back at what we have seen, our blurry glimpse often deceives us.

But that doesn't stop us from believing we can experience time differently. One of the key features of social media is this interference with our perception of time. How? We are constantly barraged with photos (and now videos) of other people. In the earlier days of Facebook, people shared entire photo albums of their vacations and other activities with their friends. Now, people might share fewer photos, but a single photo may have been taken multiple times before and highly edited before being posted, as on Instagram. Especially in the last year, with TikTok people share videos of themselves inside their homes or doing choreographed dances with friends or family. The question I have here is not about the publishing end -- why we do this or whether it is right or wrong (if you want my opinion I think people should be free to post whatever they like, with the exception of children whose parents are responsible for their actions and for protecting them). The question is about the receiving end: what is the effect of this exposure to human faces?

Tearing off the veil

Social media interferes with our perception of time. And therefore, our perception of closeness with our friends, family, acquaintances, and even strangers. When you see a photo or video someone posted one hour ago, it feels as if your friend is immediately before you at that very second. It feels like there is nothing between you and this digital persona.

One might feel temporarily close to someone through social media by indirectly learning about their life updates. This is a different interaction than directly engaging with someone, for example by calling or video chatting a friend to share news of an engagement. Both media are digital; it's jut that the latter is more active than the former. What connection between two people needs to thrive is presence, the direct antithesis of passive social media scrolling. To close the tiny but infinitely complex expanse between you and the person next to you takes time, openness, vulnerability, and above all engagement. By being passive in our interactions, we distance ourselves from those around us. If we think of ourselves as Billy from Vonnegut's novel, we have only a tiny peephole with which we can view the universe; only occasionally does something precious or beautiful cross our line of sight, like a butterfly floating in the breeze.

Wouldn't it be a shame to miss that butterfly? We have no control over when we experience on the planet, but while we are here we can try to make sense of the kaleidoscope that we view moment to moment. Seeing curated and often edited images of people that I used to know places a veil over the peephole that I've chosen to do without. It's been two years since I deleted my Facebook account. On the surface my life didn't change much immediately after -- I still went to work everyday, exercised in the evenings, read and danced as much as I could -- but I started to unwittingly tend to the relationships that I had neglected since I opened an account when I was thirteen. One friend and I started posting letters to each other. Another sent me an email updating me on what she has been up to. Others reached out for the first time since high school. I suppose there's nothing like the thought of never getting the chance to talk to someone again to get you to send the message that's been on your mind forever.

All this is not to say that I reject social media and technology altogether. On the contrary I'm quite optimistic about how people all over the world can connect with each other so convenient, especially in a difficult time such as a pandemic. The key is to harness the technology. In the Vonnegut example, our technology should expand our peephole, not cast a veil over our ephemeral glimpse of time around us.

That's where the idea for this blog came from. When I quit social media, I still wanted a way to connect with people, but I wanted it to be meaningful. I wanted to produce something rather than always consume. I wanted to engage. I want to share my humble musings, ideas, and reactions to the world I see. But I would appreciate your company. Write or comment, send me an email, or talk to me in person if you have thoughts, or better yet, challenges to anything presented here. I want to engage with you and hopefully expand the diameters of our pipe by a millimetre or two. Welcome aboard the ride.