I’m falling out of love with instant information

‘Oh my God, you’re the youngest person in this office but you’re such an old person! You’re a luddite,’’ sighed my early 30s co-worker in the part-amused part-exasperated tone she saves just for me. I’d just led a bloodless revolt against her campaign for the office to introduce Slack. If you’re lucky enough to never have used Slack, it’s supposedly a super-efficient intra-office messaging system that’s revolutionising workplaces by allowing you to communicate instantly with your co-workers without using email.

Or, as I put it to our CEO, it’s like having a idiotic, incessantly needy parrot sitting on your shoulder screeching out every minor concern/ stupid GIF/passive aggressive rant by Karen from Finance over whoever is leaving their lunch in the office fridge.

Now I know it’s all the rage, and maybe you love hearing updates on the bacteria colony in the abandoned hummus. But I don’t. And having used Slack in two previous workplaces, I was damned if I was going to open my mental inbox to yet another influx of unfiltered intra-office bilge. So I launched a masterful campaign of constant moaning until everyone decided it to drop it.

On reflection, given that I’m young enough not to remember a time before Facebook, my resistance to Slack does seem rather luddite.

You’d think that being a ‘‘young person these days’’ I’d always be on my phone, loving every new way of instant communication and infatuated with anything whizz-bang shiny and straight from Silicon Valley. And a few years ago I probably would have been.

But this year I’ve noticed something change. I am actually getting more luddite. I think it all started when, like many people this year, I fell hard out of love with social media. I was already starting to feel wary about Facebook since data harvesting and election interfering turned Mark Zuckerberg into the geekiest, worst-dressed Bond villain the world’s ever seen.

Then there’s the fact that it feels you can’t have a conversation these days with your friends by themselves, it’s always them and their 2000 Snapchat followers. There’s also my personal, souldestroying experience of trying to be a social media influencer.

But most importantly, it just felt like every time I opened social media there was a poisonous, overwhelming wave of unfiltered ranting. I feel like I’ve grown up surrounded by constant, unconsidered downloading of anything and everything people are feeling.

My feeds are awash with inflammatory fake news, outrageous click-bait headlines, stream-ofconsciousness diatribes from the outraged residents of the Facebook community page, or just the inanely vicious comment threads of communal pile-ons.

Far from being the face of the bright new future, it felt like slipping back into medieval England, where I was encouraged to throw eggs of outrage at someone I didn’t know for committing a crime I didn’t have time to understand. I was over it.

I’m not alone in this. According to recent research, Gen Z is increasingly likely to start logging off social media entirely. Half of people born after 1995 report that they’re considering quitting or have quit a social media platform, and the numbers who report social media as being important to them are dropping off considerably.

My exhaustion with social media has spilled out into a larger rejection of wider forms of technology. I’ve actually started doing things my Granny would approve of. Like putting down my phone, buying magazines, paying for news and listening to the radio.

I’m disengaging with instant sources of information, and actually paying for slower, more considered conversation via things like magazines. I’ll be crocheting next.

I know what’s happened. Having been brought up in an age of constant access, my appetite for instant-ness is exhausted. The era of immediate information was supposed to make us enlightened and liberated, but it just makes me worn-out and disgusted.

It makes us quicker, but it sure as hell doesn’t make us more thoughtful or enlightened. What it does make me do is miss considered discussion and thoughtful communication, in everything from news to how we talk to people in the office.

So yes, the last thing I want is Slack pinging away and yet another stream of useless, incessant updates on things I really didn’t need to know. Not when it feels like I’ve been binge-eating intellectual crap for a decade. My brain needs a detox.

It felt like slipping back into medieval England, where I was encouraged to throw eggs of outrage at someone I didn’t know ...