With the recent events in the US, I’ve decided to finally delete my twitter account. I’ve been on the fence since the Musk takeover (only then?? yes, i know). I kept hanging on because I was still using twitter to follow anime announcements which almost exclusively make their updates there. I will also miss the manga fan-arts that also are pretty common in twitter.

Japanese internet, specifically Japanese twitter is weird. It’s like a VPN or the tor network: They’re literally taking up the same space but somehow it’s isolated thanks to the Nihonggo barrier. Non-jp speakers can only look and translate line per line while literal chaos is happening right in front of our eyes.

With my twitter gone, my only active (mainstream) social media is now down to one: Instagram. One can argue that Threads, Reddit and Youtube technically also counts as social media, but personally, until a non-techie person mentions these platforms to me IRL, they still do not count as mainstream in the Philippines.

I also used to have a Tiktok account but I deleted it almost immediately because I see myself being addicted to it. I created an account to see what the fuss is all about. All I saw were scantily clad people dancing. (If you know me, you know that I have sooo many thoughts about dancing and watching people dance. I don’t like it.) It turned me off even before it had the chance to adapt its algorithm to my tastes. I was an early adopter too. I was there before the fake-ass tiktok voice became popular.

Umpteenth time I re-started blogging

Due to circumstances that I’d rather not mention here, I think I’m going back to blogging in the near future.

I’m starting to lose patience with Meta. My Instagram will go away very soon. And by soon I mean within 3 months up to maybe three years. Everything is video now. I hate it. If I had a dollar for every time I almost threw my phone to the wall after hearing meow meow, chipmunk laughter, monotonous AI voice narrations, and “influencers” pointing at a video above/behind them, I probably wouldn’t need to find a job.

I hate people making videos for literally everything, especially tutorials. Tutorials that could’ve been summed up into three bullet points are instead made into a 10 minute video with sponsorships for products that solve first-world problems. I’m forced to pause, restart and skim videos when I could just be reading instructions instead. What a waste of storage and bandwidth!

I’m also tired of short form videos. They had the potential to solve the problem I mentioned above, but instead of seeing “content”, I usually see a vertical video (or worse, a horizontal video cropped to fit a vertical aspect ratio) with a floating influencer explaining things as if I don’t have eyes.

Instagram used to be a fun place for people who knew how to take photos. Now instead of photos of people/places/things, we have pictures of text… or videos of text. of course there’s some background music, and of course the music is irrelevant to what’s written (/s).

I may not like videos but I like storytelling. My personal belief is that a photo is great if it can tell the viewer what its subject is without the need for a caption. I like photos that lead the eyes to its subject without distractions. Videos essentially do the same thing with more complexity and dimension, but good videos are extremely uncommon. Good videos aren’t usually even popular or viral. I’d even argue that a lot of good video died with Vine (remember Vine?)

Reflections

So what will I do now?

I think I want to start writing more. I’m thinking of writing about the things I watched, read, or seen within the day or week. I learned this hobby/habit from a friend. Every time she watches a movie, she creates a write up of her thoughts on the movie on her journal. She’s not doing it for mental health or anything, but I think that’s a good habit. I think it helps a person be more mindful of our surroundings and helps lessen our screen zombiefication.

Speaking of reflections, these days I’m watching/listening a lot of Dr. K’s videos and podcasts.

In the recent episode I listened to, I learned more about the effects of instant gratification provided by games, video streaming, porn, food delivery and all of the other modern instant services afforded by our modern tech. All these instant-things rewire our brains to an insane level. Among other things, it makes our brains resist new things especially if these new things take time and effort to learn. I want to dig a bit deeper into the science, but ironically, my brain has already fallen victim to that same issue.

I often wonder why only a handful of people are talking about digital detox. Am I the only one who feels like my brain is “heavy” after a session of doom scrolling? If not, how come I don’t hear about anyone else complaining about this feeling?