Technology and Social Media

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The Month I Deleted Everything

Two years ago my screen time report told me I had spent five hours and forty minutes a day looking at a telephone. Not working on it. Looking at it. That is a part-time job with no salary.

So on a Sunday evening I deleted three social media apps from my phone. I did not close the accounts – I am not a hero – I simply removed them from the device to see what would happen over one month.

The first three days were embarrassing. I picked up my phone perhaps ninety times a day and found nothing there. My thumb went to the exact place on the screen where the app used to be. Twice I found myself opening the calculator instead, and once I spent eleven minutes trying to upload a photograph to nowhere at all, and then scrolled through my own pictures like a man reading his own diary.

By the second week something quieter happened. I read two books. I noticed that I was sleeping properly. And I stopped having the small permanent feeling that somewhere, something was happening that I was missing.

What surprised me most was how little there was to catch up on. When I logged in at the end of the month, expecting a mountain, there were nineteen notifications, of which four mattered. Everything I had genuinely needed to know had reached me anyway – by message, or from somebody at work, or from my mother, who is a more reliable news service than any app ever built.

I had missed one thing. A friend had posted that his father was ill, and I had not seen it for four weeks. That was not a small thing, and I have thought about it since.

So I did not stop completely. I went back with rules. I follow about forty people now instead of six hundred. I turned every notification off, which is the single most effective change I have ever made to a telephone. I check the privacy settings once a year, because they change them quietly with every update and never in your favour.

And I blocked two people, which I had spent years believing was rude, and which turned out to cost me nothing at all.

I still share things. I still like photographs of other people’s children and I still read the comments under articles that I know will make me angry. My profile photograph is now four years old rather than nine, and my username is still the one I chose when I was fourteen, which I cannot change without losing everything, and which I will therefore carry to my grave.

The rest of my house has not learned anything from this. There are five devices charging in the kitchen most evenings, somebody has taken my charger again, the wifi password is written on a piece of paper stuck to the fridge, and my nephew asks for it before he says hello.