Setting Boundaries for Digital Wellness

How do you think screens have reshaped our IRL etiquette with each other even when no screens are present? I mean, how much time do you have ? I think it's sort of the easy answ er is that we've forgotten how to communicate with each other. Our screens have become this dashboard or this interface in a way where we flatten the human experience. Hello, hello. I'm Britt Lneewyis and you,'re listening to It's Bit Amin from NPR, a show about what's going on in culture and why it doesn't happen by accident. We're all living online, whether it's through phones or other screens, but our online behavi or isn't the same as in real life. How we speak, how we engage, how we argue is very, very different. So what are these norms? And how can we make the internet into a nicer place. Today, I'm speaking with Jason Param, senior writer at Wired to discuss how we can make sure our real life social etiquette can trickle into our online spaces. Jason, welcome back to it's been a minute. Good, good to be here. Okay, so Jason, you are aware of these like mostly Gen Z screen maxers who are on their phones all day long. One of your colleagues at Wired wrote about it . Tell me more about them. So screen maxing is sort of this tribe of internet users. Typically millennials or Gen Z who log extreme amounts of sort of daily screen time. I think what we've noticed is that scream maxers typically average more than nineteen hours a day on their phone. Yeah, I'm really trying to understand nineteen hours so they like barely sleep also too because they're always on the phone. Right. But they're using it for for everything entertainment, for escape, for socializing, for work . They're literally glued to their phones at all times. I'm not gonna lie. I did some screenax ming on Sunday and then I broke to watch a little bit, watch the Love Island . And then I went right on back to screen maxing. I can't imagine doing that every single day . As you have detailed across so many of your pieces , in so many ways you have noticed the ways in which like the screens that mediate our lives are sort of mediating them even if we're not using even if they're not in front of us at this point. Like I don't know, like anyone who's interacted with a toddler at some point in the past five to ten years has likely experienced like a point where the toddler has kind of treated your face. I don't know if this happened to you, but I've definitely happened to you. They treated my face like a phone or a tablet and they're kind of like trying to swipe me off exactly. They're trying to like swipe you on or off even if the screen is not present. And I wonder if the same thing is happening with us as adults. Like how do you think screens have reshaped our IRL etiquette with each other even when no screens are present. I mean, how much time do you have? I think it's sort of the easy answer is that we've forgotten how to communicate with each other. Our screens have become this dashboard or this interface in a way where we flatten the human experience . And sort of like the sort of I think consequences that we are seeing now in the immediate sort of aftermath of the second and first generation of social media , you know, teens are feeling more isolated and depressed . We're seeing sort of social media bans across Europe and Australia in response to this because I think adults and just politicians and figures, political figures are trying to like say maybe there is a problem. Maybe the consequences of what social media has done to our young people and the way it's changing, how we interact and how we feel is not actually good for us. And we sort of like put some guardrails around that . But I think the two biggest for me that have happened and the way that the screens have reshaped how we interact with each other is that we all kind of speak a logarithm now . We all sort of have aura or is we're all maxing, adding the suffix and maxing . But I think part of that is because the internet and our screens and these ecosystems that we live in in our phone, they only reward legibility and they only be legible is to speak or sound like other people . And so I think we all start to sort of speak from the same scripts, if you will . And obviously life is more complex than that and what's happening in the human experience is more complex, but I think we pick up these easy scripts and we start to everybody has Ourana, everybody has rids or vibes or you know you the birthday. You know, right things that you listen . My mom told me my mom my father's birth day was this spring and she was she was telling him that it was a birthday. I was like, oh my gosh . I think back to a piece that you wrote about solo maxing. Like I suppose that there are and I want to ask you to explain what that is in a second. I suppose there are points in my life in which I was solo maxing. I mean I have been known to decide that I'm like not dating for two months and undergoing a personal transformation or at least feel that I'm undergoing a personal transformation by spending time by myself and thinking deeply and journaling and all this stories and stuff like that, but it's not necessarily the same as looking in a mirror. It's kind of like viewing yourself through a digital lens and thinking about how you are experiencing life compared to so many other people in comparison to yourself. Yeah, so solo maxing is this newish trend among young people again who are obsessed with this idea of personal self enhancement. You know, there's been looks maxing, there's been protein maxing, there's been sleep maxing, people joke about depression maxing . And so l maxing came out of this idea, you know, recently, inflation being very high, people not being able to afford to go out and do things in dating become very expensive. So a lot of young people have reframed their relationship to themselves and how they date as a sort of like single singular pursuit . And so it's all about the single lifestyle and going all these side quest s by themselves and doing things, you know, just kind of like living a very happy and fulfilled single singlehood, if you will. I think there's something very beautiful about that I think that like having the skill of being confidently and happily alone or doing things on your own, being independent in that way, I think it's so healthy. I think it's a wonderful thing. But also I can't help but think about the ways in which that's like it's almost like a rebranding of a pretty common like adult experience sort, of maybe either carving out time for yourself to sort of become yourself and enjoy your own company. I suppose it's kind of like a generational thing to sort of rebrand your own experience as something totally brand new which we think some psychology behind that I want to get into actually why no, sure, sure go ahead. I think part of that one of the other reasons I think the screens have shaped our relationship to the people around us and how we communicate is it's turned us all into main characters. And so we rebrand our experiences as these sort of like personal self pursuits where we are sort of the main character in them , pulling from these easy scripts, pulling from these sort of like these sort of algorithms speak in a way that we become characters on our phones, right? And we respond to each other like we're characters. So I think solo maxing is also part of this sort of that as well. You were saying that basically like the screens have kind of like the sort of screen mediated experience shifted us from thinking like about like how should I act or what should I say in a given situation to like shifting to a place of thinking like how much attention am I entitled to? Right, right, right, right. Please tell me more about that. Right. So I think the sort of biggest change we've seen in how we understand social etiquette and how it's being reshaped through our phones particularly through our screens . So it's gone from like in a sort of IRL conversation when you're with sort of we're talking in person. It's gone from sort of like when should I speak? What should I say? Like sort of like try to manage the expectations of the dance of the convers ation in real time to I think through our phones it's sort of like, well how much attention am I entitled to now? How much of a main character am I allowed to be? How much of this experience that I'm having on the internet, which is largely for a lot of people a sort of like single user experience. How much of that am I entitled to and how much leeway will people sort of like give me to sort of do that or respond to that? What do you mean by single user experience? I just like a gaming term. I think sort of before social media, before we all sort of came together on these main avenues and these main sort of cultural marketplaces. I think a lot of people were navigating the internet in their own sort of like POV experience, right? Whether that was in chat rooms, whether that was on message boards, it was sort of like we all come to the internet from a different space and we all sort of navigate it in a different way, even though we're all, you know, we're both on X or Instagram or we're on Facebook and these sort of platforms do exist, but we're navigating them in sort of disparate ways that aren't the same at all, even though the platforms themselves haven't changed Don't go anywhere. We've sort of trapped ourselves in our phones and these are just sort of the rules that people have made up . And until we make new ones, this is just what it is. We've got more coming up after the break . Even though it's called social media , there's a very intense antisocial bent to a lot of the way that people behave online And it sometimes feels like people are interacting in a way online that I'm like, I don't know if you would do this in real life. I wonder like how would you say some of that has trickled into real life, that sort of antisocial kind of antisocial a social behavior impulse . Yeah, I think as the online world and the real world have blurred infinitely , I think that it's kind of made social etiquette obsolete , especially online. You know, we're talking about Love Island and I think a lot of these shows that have intense fandoms around them have given people license to in some way be in your business and which doesn't always bring out the best in people and I think it gives people license to in some ways tap into their worst instincts or their worst selves . I think that's always been true of celebrities, but I think now with social media and influencers, that's especially true of influencers and how we sort of like negotiate the space we're all sharing together . I think one real unusual thing for me that is really haunting is that social media doesn't let you forget. I think, you know, these digital ecosystems have a far sort of like longer and more exhaustive way to just remember everything you've done in your life that you've posted and people in return will throw that in your face . I think we've seen that with Love Island. We've seen that with again with the Knicks. We've seen that with different shows and different celebrities . Our mistakes never expire online. And I think in real life, we give people a little more grace, we give people a little more empathy . But online, I think that just goes all out the window . Again, because I think we're interacting through these screens , we're not really understanding that these are humans on the other side of it and we've sort of flattened their experience to respond to our experience because again we are the main characters and so if this is sort of the reaction or the story that I'm trying to create or the narrative that I'm trying to create in this story that I'm building in my phone, then this is just what it's going to be. I think a really good example of that, right is like Melanie on Love Island , they were like coming for her because I guess some of her old photos had surfaced of where she was overweight and people were like she was like she's like a plus size plus size model. Very beautiful. Yeah. All of the photos were in like a modeling context which was yeah. The people tried to present it like a gotcha. Super confident like she was having fun like doing her thing, but like people were like, oh, this is why she acts like a try me. This is why she's like this on the show. But it's like you would never do this to her in person if you were talking to her in a conversation. You would never bring this up, right? Or you would never sort of like have this sort of aggressive behavior around it . So I think it's really troubling when we see people we don't let people we don't give people second chances and we don't let their mistakes sort of expire in a way that that feels truer to who we are as humans in real life. I think about like Connor's story from Beautiful Rivalry , everybody, heated rivalry . As soon as he reached, you know, a certain level of fame, which happened very, very quickly. I mean, people started going on YouTube and looking and they found his YouTube for when he was like a middle schooler or even like, you know, finding these people and like pulling up, I don't know, like finding out who they're dating or pulling up their photos or YouTube channel for middle school. It's kind of like it's not weird because it's not necessarily a gotcha. It's not necessarily like a mistake , but it is like I, don't know, like you this idea, I think there's there's this idea there that everyone's entitled to every version of you and to know everything about you . And everyone's entitled to judge , like your past versions of you in a way that doesn't happen if you meet somebody simply in real life, right? Like if I met you like, I don't know, walking down the street or something like that , the first thing I wouldn't think to do was to be like, You know what? I'm gonna go find his middle school yearbook and see what's in there. Like that's not the first thing that I'm going to do . We don't expect to have access to people's personal history upon meeting them or that we are allowed to judge their personal history like face to face. That's not normal. Yeah, I don't know. I think partly the experience because of the experience we're having in our phones, there's this sort of instant ranking we do with people when we meet them online. We automatically want to judge or impose a sort of value set upon them in a way that again we wouldn't in real life . I reported this story a few weeks ago about an Only Fans creator who announced earlier that he was moving on from his his sex work career and that he wanted to just sort of do something different . And he was part of a wave of sort of I had seen, I'd noticed this trend amongst a lot of first gen only fans creators who had announced that they were retiring at the top of the year . And there's been this sort of wave of bash where it's like, well, you don't, you're not entitled to move on. We're always going to share your work or watch your work. And he was on Twitter saying, you know, hey guys, I know my work is out there, please stop sharing that. I'm aware of it, you can keep it, but just don't keep circulating it. And people were sitting in the nastiest comments and I was really interested in this idea of like what is the afterlife of somebody's identity and why aren't they allowed to move on from it? And why don't we let them do that? They feel entitled to, again, every version of you are of who you are. And they feel like there's this access that it's just it should be the default of the internet. And I don't think that's fair. You know, I think there's this conversation it became really a conversation about sort of like the ethics of like consent . And I don't have a definitive answer for that yet, but it is it is something I think a lot of people are wrestling with now in sort of , you know, this third stage of social media, this third generation of social media that we're in where we're really trying to figure out, you know, what are these real effects that we're seeing from it? What marks the third generation of social media? So I think the first generation of social media, what we saw was sort of this place for community building , this place for people looking for their people . I think a lot of early stage social media for me was sort of like early Twitter days right like early two thousand eight, two thousand nine and then second stage social media, I would say second generation of social media came around Black Lives Matter era twenty sixteen. I think we saw a lot of the platforms having to grow up and accept a lot of responsibility and people using their platforms in different ways . Sort of the rise of the influencer during this era . I think a lot of it a lot of social media was being more commodified during this era in good and bad ways. And then now in this third era of social media, I think that's being sort of mediated by AI and pushed by AI and shaped by everything that AI is bringing where truth is no longer sort of like the default. It's sort of like we question everything we see, we question if that person's actually real. And so I think this new stage of social media has questioning a lot. Yeah, yeah. No, I mean it's well first of all I want to ask like first generation of only fans, like when would these people have been creating around what time? They joined pandemic maybe like pre pandemic, it really started popping off. I also say you were one of the first people I've ever seen my problem . Thank you. You were no yeah, it was it was one of those sort of like guttural instincts I kept hearing about it and people like were, You have to write about only fans, write about only fans. We became this big thing during the pandemic. And then a lot of creators, a lot of major creators announced that they were retiring at the end of last year top of this year . And so this idea of that we don't allow them to move on for me just feels wrong in a way . But I think I'm not surprised by it, I guess. I think this is just the experience that we 've created for ourselves on the internet. We've sort of trapped ourselves in our phones and these are just sort of the rules that people have made up . Anytime we make new ones, this is just what it is. Don't go anywhere. My rule of thumb is like, if you're not actually willing to say this to somebody's face and I don't think you should say this to them on the internet. You've got more coming up after the break . It's interesting too because like I mean there have been people who have made like adult content just who have been acting on screens like for decades who choose to retire or step away and in the past it wasn't necessarily like something that people I think people felt like they didn't have any control over it . And so maybe they'd be like, oh, okay, well, they retired or I haven't seen them in a while and so it is what it is and you move on with your life . But to your point, there's kind of like a sense of entitlement now, like you said to every version of someone. I mean, it's like people if there were still a GAAP store at seventeenth and fifth Avenue in Manhattan and people went there looking for me to fit them for a bra, that would be weird . That would be weird. I haven't worked there since two thousand eight or two thousand seven, one of the two. So that would be that would be strange if someone did that . But we don't necessarily think about it that way when it's somebody who I don't know. It's like yeah, we don't think about it a different way We have talked a lot about like things that we've lost through like through the sort of mediation of screens in our lives. But I wonder do you think there's anything that we've gained any ways in which the way we interact with each other in real life has been improved in some way by having screens mediate so many other aspects of our lives? I'm a bit of a pessimist when it comes to social media these days, so gosh, it's hard for me to find something that's I don't know. Yeah, I don't have a I don't have an answer for this one unfortunately I had to ask, I had to ask I guess the definitive answer sounds like is that you can't necessarily say yes that anything has gotten better. But I think we're just we're just we're too close to it still. I think we're still in the muck of it and it's hard to really say I think a lot of the immediate posit ives that we found community , you know, finding a sense of self , doing all these things online that brought us joy I think now have been corrupted by a lot of big tech platforms, by a lot of corporations in ways that I think people just it's really changed the experience we have not only online but through our phones in a way that I still think we're reckoning with daily . It's just hard to come out of that yeah. How do you see dead internet theory like fitting into all this? Like for people who don't know, dead internet theory is the idea that the internet is no longer a human centric place . And instead , most of the content interactions and social media accounts on the internet are actually bots. Like to put it plainly, dead internet theory posits that a lot of what we see online is fake . Fake accounts, fake posts, fake videos and images . How does that play into sort of our withering etiquette like both online and offline? I mean, it is our reality . You know, AI is certainly supercharged dead internet theory. I think there was a study that came out last year that's suggested I believe more than fifty percent of the sort of articles generated online were fake . It's scary , but I think that we're we already live in that reality in a way that a lot of people just don't have the digital literacy for and ways to navigate that . And so I think right when you fundamentally change who you engage with online from humans to bots , that changes how we engage, right? And so we're all speaking from the feed. We're all speaking a logarithm . And so I think that's what for me the fundamental change is really it's sort of like it opens us and makes us more vulnerable to that we not only don't have control over but are being used in a way that aren't sort of positive or might have negative effects in the ways we can' thatt see it just quite yet. I don't know. I'm just thinking about sort of having this reality that we live in, like you said, our lived experience . Being in a way poisoned by the fact that like online, a lot of people are fighting with fake accounts, following fake trends , reacting to fake outrage , and also could be absorbing and then reenacting the bad etiquette fake a social media poster, like all in pursuit of, as you said, becoming the main character for, you know, a few hours or a few days or a week or whatever. In this scenario, it's kind of like your shadowbxoing , like you're shadowboxing an opponent who is always ready because like bots don't need to sleep and fake accounts don't need to eat and they don't have to go to work or pay bills. Like this is just there's like a way for you to constantly engage, become the main character. Or maybe if you, you know, some people like this, but you could also become the donkey of the day . But I think it's kind of like when there is when there is sort of like no fundamental basis for truth, we have to sort of start performing realities. So you see a lot more AI influencers. You see people making up these trends , you see sort of like all these bots and scammers sort of proliferating across the social web . And so I think through screens we sort of have to reinvent ourselves as main characters because there's just sort of this appetite for theater for we sort of play into the legibility of it, right? We have to sort of give into the virality because we want to be legible. Yeah. Being legible is just saying we want to be seen. And really, that is really human at the end of the day , but I think there's sort of like a lot of difficulty around it. It can't be healthy for all of us to be communicating like this all of the time or thinking about ourselves like this all of the time. Are there ways that we could kind of I don't know check ourselves or present ourselves or regard ourselves in real life social situations and conversations to be less alienating to other people but also less alienating to ourselves. Like, I don't know, how do we I guess how do we sort of like people used to say this a lot when I was, I don't know, when I was a young girl like in college age be her now. How can we be here now? Like how can we kind of you know put some separation there for ourselves and actually be in the real world and act like real people? Yeah, I think this is something that maybe it's because I turned forty in January and I've been going through like a mini midlife crisis and like, what do I want to be? What do I want for myself in this next decade ahead ? But I think part of that for me looked like just setting better boundaries. And so at the top of the year I became what my colleague eventually a D and D maximalist I now have my phone on Do not Disturb twenty four hours a day. I have no notifications going off on my phone and I still check my phone just because I've been on the internet for so long I just, muscle memory. I'm always grabbing for my phone. But I think the sort of I was looking for a way to shut out a lot of the noise and the constant churn of media and consuming internet and just everything that's coming at us all the time . But I think for me , it's reestablished a healthier relationship to myself and just sort of how I interact and engage with people through my phone and online. I love that. I am also a D and D Maximolist. I'm a D warrior . I get no notifications. My phone does not vibrate. My phone does not ring. And to your point, like, I think people are annoyed sometimes that I don't pick up and I don't immediately , whatever. But you know, I'm sure I for my job and I'm sure for yours, it's like your phone probably you probably reached the point where your phone was going off like all of the time. Yeah, I love the idea of like returning to a place online where we do respect people's anonymity. I think for me , you know, I was sort of an AOL sort of like messenger , I was on there all the time when it first came out and dropped back in the day, right? I think my first screening was like rock vet one because I was just obsessed with like JZ and Rockefeller records back in the day . But I think there was something very fraying and very innocent about the sort of early days of the internet in that way where it's sort of like we're just kind of here to like learn about each other and I think we weren't really yet placing these sort of like value sets on each other . Yeah. So I love the idea of like returning to this space where we do sort of allow for more anonymity around the people we are online . Also have a rule like if you wouldn't say this to somebody in person don't say it to them online. Like I think a lot of people talk outside of their mouth online, whether again if it's two sort of love island contestants, whether it's to Nicks, whether it's to whomever, but my rule of thumb is like, if you're not actually willing to say this to somebody's face and I don't think you should say this to them on the internet . And I know people feel more emboldened because there is that barrier that there is that sort of separation , but I think it's doing a disservice to in some way the experience we're all having online. I also feel like something that people used to do that they don't do anymore . There was kind of like a separation of church and state with regard to people who were sort of like in the public eye, like celebrities and also just public figures more generally and regular people online who are not public figures. My job is to host this show and maybe perhaps be a likable person, but I don't have to be like beloved by everybody or anything like that. And I kind of think that people should get back to that. Yeah, I think part of what's changed again, I think we're all characters now. We're all too Kyle's point like everything is a show and we're all characters in it at this point. So I think there's this impulse to bring people into your orbit and fit them into your narrative, whatever that is . And so that may be tagging somebody, that may be talking sideways to somebody online, that may be all sorts of things Definitely not healthy I do love this idea of, you know, a separation of sort of like church and state online. That'd be another thing I've been thinking about too. I think because we're both, I think, deeply online people, people be great if like the internet shut off like twice a week . Listen, I've been saying Wednesday and Saturday the Internet should for twenty four hours. I think it needs to shut down for two hours a day. I think we can as city, state, county, government, federal level, we can figure out the workarounds for people who work during those times, whatever it is. Or maybe everybody has the two hours a day, like where it has to be shut off for them personally. Like legally mandated . And we could yes, but the internet needs to shut off for two hours every day. I think that sometimes you need a break, whether it's touching grass, maybe it's called maybe it's phoning a friend, you know what I'm saying? Maybe reading a book , hitting the library, taking a nap. What we need to do something. We like I agree with you. It can't be the unfettered access that we have this right. And I say this as a person who's like , my phone is right in front of me. My eyes are on. And I know as soon as we finish this conversation, I'm about to be checking to see if there are any new love island takes Beyond what people have already shared last night and early this morning, I'm gonna be looking for, I'm going to be like, all right, what's going on? What do we think about? Chaos going on in Caso More this week. Exactly , exactly, exactly. Oh my gosh, well J,ason , thank you so much. Thank you for having me. I always feel better about online life after I talked to you . So thank you. Thanks for having me. That was Jason Parm, senior writer at Wired covering internet culture and online dating. And to all of you watching, thank you so much for hanging out with us. Be sure to come back to this feed every Tuesday for a fresh video episode. You can watch these episodes exclusively on Spotify, YouTube, and the NPR app.