Meditations On: Calculating the Amount of Time Spent on Social Media

I woke up with this thought: How does one calculate the Amount of Time Spent on Social Media?

Is is a round hole that needs to be filled or an amorphous blob consuming everything around it? And given the illusion that we’re doing more than one thing at a time, how does one calculate the amount of time spent on this one behavior? For some reason I have the image in my head from a short Sci-Fi video that I saw yesterday about a young family returning from time spent at the beach and the hours that they’re stuck in traffic trying to get back to their dystopian mega-city as they approach this one section of the road called the tunnel. Here they are in their electric semi-autonomous car, exactly like all the other millions of cars on this seemingly endless road traveling 4 or maybe 5 kilometers an hour, the little girl says that she’s no afraid of the tunnel and the teenage boy is enamored by the cute girl in the car next to them. The parents desperately trying to control their terror as they inch toward the entrance of the tunnel, where there briefly appears to be a sign with some double-speak slogan about “population control,” and the power to their little electric car and all the cars on the road going off and then on again as a demonstration of their lack of control and helplessness. I had no idea what this “population control” might mean. Does everyone in the tunnel die if they shut off the air circulation fans over head? Do lasers from the ceiling cook the occupants in their cars when they stop? Then toward the end, as the family inches toward the exit, the power is shut off and the heavy doors of the tunnel come down and for a moment we can’t tell if the door are in front of them or behind them or right above them. But they come crashing down and it appears that anyone still in the tunnel is “gone” or maybe it was anyone under the doors is crushed. But our family is spared. The last scene shows the boy looking at the cars around him, but he can’t the car that had the young girl he was flirting with…

I don’t know what any of this has to do with calculating time spent with the idea of calculating time spent on social media, except that it has that same sense of dread and mindless control and how one is just one unimportant player in this sea of millions… We pretend that everything is normal, when things clearly aren’t. We’re in this modern cute sedan, but it’s just one of millions of identical sedans slowly inching its way towards oblivion and the kids are mostly alright and the parents are terrified of the real dangers ahead. What a way to begin the weekend. No dread here… ha!

The video that inspired this meditation and the dream: