I Do Not Want To Be Influenced

on attention restoration

Made a bold move yesterday in which I started the process of taking my precious ‘following’ rolodex down to zero on Instagram.

I say started the process because ig limits how many people you can dismiss at one time to ‘protect the community’. It’s about 100 people in case you were wondering. So about twice a day, I log on to the guillotine.

The weight of these multi-round, swipe-to-disengage sessions is increasingly heavy. It feels cold and cruel to unfollow people I really, really like! My best friends, my relatives, crushes, admired strangers, internet mentors, people I grew up with. Some people I’ve been watching the unfurling of their internet lives for over 11 years. Nuts.

Why on earth, you ask. What an important resource, they whom you’ve paid attention to for so long. What about community? What about the mycelial network of the people? Thou art not a shrimpy little island in the sea of all worth watching on the internet! What gives?

I am someone who is deeply distracted by the doings and goings on of other people. Maybe you relate. Hello growing up in a codependent household where monitoring the temperature changes of everyone in the room was necessary for survival!

I want my attention, the most valuable asset I possess, to feel a little less like a dog yanked around on a short leash—a leash made from a daisy chain of WWJD bracelets, but instead of J it’s everyone I follow. What would so and so do? What is so and so up to?

I want to know what happens to my attention when I reel it back into the center of me.

I want to know who and what I keep up with when it isn’t served up by the feed? What will this account become if the priority is not a vehicle for consuming other peoples lives on autopilot? These questions excite me.

I think about how I am a composite of everything I’ve ever seen on the internet. I am made by all that I have scrolled through. And though the scroll has damn near decimated my short term memory and at times my self esteem, I am, after all, all that I follow.

So what happens if that disappears? What happens when everybody goes home and its just you alone in your party dress staring out into the infinite void? As an artist, I think about how to be my own biggest influence. Not forever. Maybe not even for long. But for now.

I can both honor all that has shaped me (which maybe sounds overly sentimental for social media, but I stand by it!) and then I can close the door.

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I do not want to be influenced.

I do not want my attention to be mediated by what the algorithm of social media thinks I need to look at. 

I do not want the musculature of my natural attention-roving to atrophy.

Let me be bored.

Let me be under-stimulated.

Let me notice the minutiae, the unslick, unsexy banality of everyday living off the screen.

Let me have to seek out what I want to pay attention to on the screen.

I do not want to be fed by a feed.

I do not want to slip slide down the feed luge of look at this look at this look at this, later wondering where all the hours have gone.

I do not want to use other people’s lives on the internet as a weapon against myself. 

I do not want my primary means of getting information about other people, about things happening in my community, in the world, to also be the thing that is the most hyper curated and shaped-by-machine-learning media source.

I want my attention back so I can walk it down the golden spiral staircase of my own inner being, becoming ever more fluent and attuned to my desires and visions. 

I want to hear what I think is cool, unfettered by everyone else’s cool.

I want my time back.

I want purification,

I want resurrection.

I want to remove the bumper lanes of well what is everybody else doing around here?

If I become out of touch, so it is.

If I become irrelevant, ok.

If I become cringe, then I become cringe.

Maybe I’ll make bad art and tacky posts—may I do so boldly!

Maybe I’ll risk being a dumb dumb self absorbed white girl, no longer following accounts that have both educated me and instilled a hypervigilance to not be a dumb dumb self absorbed white girl. 

May I become more real to myself, remember that I exist, and in so doing become more sturdy, more trustworthy.

I will relish the experience of all 6 trillion of my cells rolling back inward like eyeballs into their sockets. Turning away from the ceaseless obsession of gobbling up the lives of others. Having been sufficiently fed, fed up even, overstuffed at the information buffet.

Let the attention orbs focus inward, like headlamps on a car that now shine backwards into the darkness of the interior. 

Let there be light.

Let there be silence.

Let me stand on the edge of the echoing canyon that is a social media account that follows no one and hear the sound of wind blowing through nothingness. 

Let me feel the void.

Let me miss out so I may remember more of myself.

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In case this nuclear action piques your interest, might I suggest downloading your followees first into a snappy spreadsheet. This is what I did, and it feels like I’ve backed up extremely precious data that I now own.

Obnoxiously, this must be done through a 3rd party app as Instagram is not interested in any such maneuvers that threaten its dominion over your attention. It actively discourages it, as I mentioned at the top of this newsletter. So that’s fun.

Whatever it is you do with your attention, may it be suffused with much awe, much beauty, and much reverence for the dazzling mystery of being a person in the world right now.

I thank you for putting your attention orbs on these words. It’s an immeasurable gift, I DO NOT LIE!

You are a gift.

And I love when you write me!

Tell me what you’re paying attention to right now, I’m all orbs.

xx,

Melissa