TLDR 180

Burning the Candle at Both Ends

Published: 2019-01-11 • 📧 Newsletter

Welcome to Issue 180. Burning the candle at both ends.

This week:

The Case for Anonymity Online - This post details some of my recent thoughts about identity and sharing online.
The Privilege of Screentime - This post from our screentime website posits that you don't have to give children access to devices. It could/should be a right...not a privilege.
Starting Up a New Learning Space in Google Classroom - A video detailing my thoughts as I start up a new class in Google Classroom.

🔖 Key Takeaways

Social Media Solitude Paradox: Research shows social media use correlates with preference for solitary activities over social ones suggesting platforms marketed as "social" actually promote isolation not connection.
Millennials Burnout Generation: Anne Helen Petersen identifies perpetual burnout as defining generational experience for millennials raised with narrative demanding constant work resulting in current paralysis unable to complete basic tasks.
Screentime Better Questions: We'll never get good answers about screen time effects unless we start asking better questions beginning with honest definitions about what "screen time" actually means.
Social Media Value Curation: Finding joy in digital spaces requires concerted curation effort unfollowing culling and experimenting across platforms to identify what brings value versus what drains energy.
Beauty in Doing Nothing: Jenny Odell's keynote on doing nothing offers antidote to burnout culture finding beauty and design in refusal to constantly produce and perform.

📺 Watch

Online Dating App Discourse

The world of online dating has its own discourse and social practices. If you're not part of it...it can be hard to figure things out.

This week we tried to make sense of some of the online dating apps as an adolescent in the family is exploring them. This video helps make sense of the stark ways in which we eliminate the person from the equation.

Dating apps reduce human connection to swipeable profiles optimized for split-second judgments. Photos, brief bios, and algorithmic matching replace the messy complexity of actually meeting people. The "elimination of person from equation" reveals how platforms designed to facilitate connection actually systematize rejection and commodify intimacy. For adolescents navigating identity formation, these systems teach troubling lessons about human value and relationship building.

📚 Read

The "social" in social media may be a misnomer.

New research published in Psychological Reports provides evidence that the use of social media is related to a preference for solitary activities rather than social ones.

This finding inverts the assumed relationship: rather than social media connecting us, it may be training preference for parasocial relationships and curated content over messy face-to-face interaction. The causation could flow both directions—people preferring solitude use social media more, or social media use cultivates solitary preference—but either way it challenges platforms' claims about fostering community. If "social" media makes us less social, what are we actually building?

How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation

Anne Helen Petersen describing what she describes as the "base temperature" in her life...and those around her. She identifies this as being perpetually burnt out from working all of the time.

She posits that this is a shared, defining generational experience for all millennials. This is because she was raised with this narrative that people should be busy and work all of the time to be successful. That has resulted in the current situation of paralysis for these young adults.

Petersen's analysis connects burnout to childhood optimization: millennials were raised as projects to be perfected through constant achievement. Extracurriculars, AP classes, resume-building, personal branding—all training for adulthood as perpetual self-improvement. But optimization has no endpoint. You can't finish being optimized. This creates paralysis: even simple tasks feel impossible because they're never good enough. Burnout isn't overwork but internalized impossibility of rest.

We've Got the Screen Time Debate All Wrong. Let's Fix It.

For right or wrong, the big tech companies have seen which way the wind is blowing and responded to issues of digital dependence.

Experts suggest that we'll never get good answers about the effects of screen time, unless we start asking better questions. That means being honest with ourselves about what we mean by "screen time" in the first place.

"Screen time" collapses radically different activities into meaningless category. Reading ebook, video chatting grandparents, doom-scrolling Twitter, coding creative project, watching educational documentary, playing exploitative mobile game—all count as "screen time" despite vastly different cognitive demands, social contexts, and effects. Better questions ask: What are you doing? With whom? What meaning does it have? Screen time debates fail because they treat screens as problem rather than asking what practices and contexts matter.

As 2018 started winding down, I slowly started to clean up and cull my social media presence. I shared much less on Facebook and tried to decide what role that would have in my life. I also have been steadily unfollowing people on my Twitter timeline. Finally, I restarted my Mastodon profile in a different instance to engage again in those spaces.

This is a larger, concerted effort to find value and joy in each of these spaces and practices.

This great post from Aaron Davis describes his thinking about interactions in these spaces...and making them the best that they can be.

Social media curation isn't passive consumption but active construction of information environment. Unfollowing isn't rejection but boundary-setting. Experimenting across platforms (Twitter, Mastodon, etc.) recognizes different affordances suit different purposes. The effort to "find value and joy" acknowledges that default social media experience optimized for engagement not wellbeing. Making spaces work for you requires intentional design not algorithmic surrender.

Remembering the Past Through Photos

For the holiday season, my Wife purchased a Google Assistant-powered display for our kitchen. We have a number of speakers in the house and love the way we can listen to music and have dance parties while making dinner. The display adds a small monitor to our kitchen that displays a collection of our family photos.

I regularly think critically about these digital tools and their role in my life...and the life of my family unit. Reading this reflection by Doug Belshaw was meaningful for me as he reflects on the same experience.

The Google Assistant photo display raises questions about memory curation and surveillance. Which photos get shown? Who decides? What narratives do algorithmic selections construct about your family? The convenience of ambient photo display trades privacy for nostalgia—Google needs access to your photos to show them, building profiles of your family, relationships, locations, activities. Critical thinking about these tools means asking: What am I getting? What am I giving? Who benefits from this exchange?

🔨 Do

How to Do Nothing

This post shares the text and slides from a keynote given by writer and artist Jenny Odell. The video of the keynote is available here.

As we consider how busy, wired, and possibly burnt out we get in our lives...perhaps we have the opportunity to do nothing. Odell focuses on the beauty and design in nothing.

As a side note, please click through to Odell's website. It's giving me some ideas of things I'd like to create on my own site.

Odell's "doing nothing" isn't laziness but resistance to attention economy's demands for constant productivity and performance. In culture that measures worth by output, doing nothing reclaims time for observation, reflection, and presence. Beauty exists in noticing what's already there not producing new content. Design in nothing means intentional refusal not passive default. Against burnout's paralysis, doing nothing offers active choice to disengage from optimization and simply be.

🤔 Consider

"To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan and not quite enough time." — Leonard Bernstein

Bernstein's paradox about time pressure meets its limit in burnout generation. Plan without enough time creates urgency that can drive achievement but perpetual not-enough-time creates paralysis not productivity. Social media solitude shows we're burning candles connecting to screens while isolating from people. Screentime debate burns time arguing about screens instead of asking what practices matter. Social media curation requires burning energy to create joy from spaces designed to drain it. Photo displays burn privacy for convenience. Doing nothing offers way to stop burning entirely choosing presence over constant combustion. Burning candle at both ends works briefly but eventually you're left in darkness.

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🌱 Connected Concepts:

Millennials Burnout Generation — Anne Helen Petersen identifying perpetual burnout as defining generational characteristic from narrative demanding constant work resulting in paralysis for young adults in Generational Studies.
Social Media Solitude Paradox — Research showing social media use correlates with preference for solitary activities not social ones suggesting platforms marketed as social actually promote isolation in Social Psychology.
Screentime Debate Better Questions — Experts arguing we need honest definitions about what screen time means collapsing radically different activities into meaningless category prevents useful understanding in Media Effects.
Digital Photo Memory — Doug Belshaw reflecting on Google Assistant photo displays raising questions about memory curation surveillance and trading privacy for nostalgia in Digital Privacy.
Doing Nothing Resistance — Jenny Odell keynote on doing nothing as resistance to attention economy finding beauty in refusal to constantly produce and perform in Attention Economy.

Part of the 📧 Newsletter archive documenting digital literacy and technology.