Scroll: 11 Media Missives; Only Concept, No Meaning (No Social Media, Not Now, Not Ever)

Scroll: 11 Media Missives; Only Concept, No Meaning (No Social Media, Not Now, Not Ever)

By Rowan Foxley

The rising dissemination of literary-based and philosophic-based social media accounts present a uniquely problematic crossroads for members of the literary community.

On one path we find eyeballs, potential: a path to exposure for non-readers, for blossoming writers and artists; for former readers to become reinvigorated.

On the other path we find addiction, deferment: Look that quote up down the road, finish that essay down the road, bookmark that clip for later, read later, paint later.

Right now I need to Scroll.

This ‘deferment’ is what worries us — universally — for we drown in it as a slow-suffocating, quickly-evaporating final breath that signals imminent soul-death.

For the reader, the writer, the artist, and the thinker, social media’s fine-tuning represents nothing more than addiction, an irreversible deletion of our precious Time, and a further obfuscation of the increasingly-ineluctable veil that separates Wishing and Doing; Boredom and Oasis.

1st Missive: On Potential

The potential of social media for our readers and writers appears, at first glance, to be immense: exposure, eyeballs, a platform for higher thought.

The dream is that people who may have never read a single book stumble onto literary or philosophic accounts and are inspired to go read, a seminal inauguration. Another fantastic possibility: Writers, whose work may never be read nor published otherwise, are finally read. Their website finally gets traffic and clicks. They build a community. They are able to promote the dangers of social media, the need for higher education and critical discourse. Or perhaps someone who read in college or high school but has been Scrolling for ten years stumbles onto the literary account and goes out and buys Fear and Trembling or whatever, and reads anew, at last! These accounts offer a break from engagement-bait with real, genuine content. They get people thinking. Talking. Sharing. Snowballing. Folks who’ve had a half-finished novella haunting them for years sit down and finish it. They use the medium to inspire; through the medium of death they inspire life, motion, momentum.

And we'd be fools to not seize whatever mediums we have left at our fast-failing disposal, right?

2nd Missive: On Deferment, On Scrolling, On No Time

But then I Scroll, become an infinitive in a disturbingly finite life.

Before, when I had Time on my side, I read 20,000 pages of the Western Canon. I had the Time.

I scrolled afterwards and (truthfully) throughout (the Great Books Program of St. John’s College), anyway.

Then one day I graduated from the Reading Menagerie on the hill above the Holy City. Flung unto modernity, what am I to do? l wondered in the encroaching years, to continue the project, to read all I need to read. It appears I have the Time, still.

Then I scrolled.

And when will I find the Time?

We are all intimate friends with the overwhelming beyond-reachness of the global oeuvre. How much we have yet to learn, how little Time.

So I Scroll.

3rd Missive: On Reading

Often we do not read. Not anymore. This is what I came here to stress.

Why cannot we cease the Scroll?

Annihilate it, that is

We do not read

We Scroll

As addicting as heroin, they say.

4th Missive: On the Morning’s Scroll; On Kafka

Wake up, alarmed, stumble to the bathroom, phone in hand.

Scroll.

Reddit, say, hey, how bad is Reddit, got me my nice literary followins, and my nice baseball followins, and some quality r/animals and r/fuckin … democrats? … politics? and whatever. You know, I’ll gather some quotes, type some notes. I check the news. “Trump threatens to eat Child on Live TV; Schumer and Dems say Trump may be in the wrong, perhaps ought not eat Child”. Cool.

I Scroll. Nothin.

Instagram now, then?

Oh hey, it's that nice little screamingly-motivational Japanese man saying, “Today matters! You matter! Seize the day! Today is the only day there will ever be!”

I Scroll.

Ad for ADHD meds.

I Scroll.

Bearding man saying, “Do you feel brined out, burned out, lacking motivation, can’t complete basic —”

I Scroll.

Another ad for ADHD meds.

I Scroll.

Oh, hello Roger Penrose, you nutter! What kinda vaguely composed cosmology you got cookin for me today?

I Scroll.

Oh hey! Hey, ho! This here Instant Gram is also tuned unto me, me likes, and me wrathful moral dislikes! Me Inquisities!

I see a BOLDLY HEADLINED clip of DERRIDA talkin’ ’bout language versus speech, BOLDLY SUBTITLED (for the convenience of the non-headphoned viewer on the subway). Hey! I like Derrida! Love that kind-speaking French-Algerian. Wish we coulda read and talked about Derrida in school after we had to read that Nazi Heidegger.

I Scroll.

Some slides about why you are unable to focus: “Stephen King writes 2000 words a day, even the day his mother died, and scientists can’t explain this one trick!”

I Scroll.

Eight minutes into life and I am On-Line, baby.

I Scroll.

A Johnnie, talking about Polymarket and Kalshi. Explaining that they are addictive little gambling hyperreality machines designed to endlessly sap your soul and dineros. Social Media is meant to be non-lethally addictive! this Johnnie encourages at me through the screen. That’s the point! he says. And I agree. Well said, sir. The engineers, the architects designed it this way, he continues with influencer enthusiasm. Poor Johnnies having to hawk their wares on the cold streets of Meta-City. But hey, I also wish I had one of these accounts. I wish I had eyeballs on me! Hey! I wanna be admired, too! Hey! I love being seen!

I Scroll.

Oh, it’s a quote from Marx about the proletariat that seems prescient. I really outta read some more Marx. But now I don’t have to! Someone just gave me a wonderfully succinct summary! And fuck but anyways I haven’t read more than … 10 pages a day of anything this week? At fucking best, at fucking best.

I Scroll.

Ad for ADHD meds.

I blindside unto a shower and clothes and kettle and coffee and end up outside with 45 minutes till work.

I Scroll.

Ad for alternative ADHD meds.

I Scroll.

An obnoxiously out of context Kafka quote about love.

Kafka, who worked 10-12 hours a day, 5-6 days a week, as a legal clerk, for the entirety of his adult life. He wrote from 4 am till 7 am, and then again from 6pm until 10pm. He was, of course, never published in his lifetime, and famously we have only a stark betrayal of deathbed wishes to thank for Kafka’s works. And what my myopic mind cannot help but consider is: what if he had a phone? What if he had the most Instant Grammification? How could he have written in those desperately trialled and sleep-deprived hours, when a lethal dopamine hit was waiting so obsequiously?

How many would-be Kafkas (though I would never wish such an existence on any soul) of our generation will never write a single word?

I Scroll.

Those 45 minutes before work I Scroll.

I Scroll, Scroll more, more Scroll, Scroll I.

On realizing there are 12 earth-minutes left ’fore work, I scream. Where’d all the fuckin Time go?

I Scroll, one last desperate Time, so Desertedly Bored in this Horrific Oasis I could sob.

5th Missive: On the Fortunate Few; On Rehabituation; On Balance

But then we begin to count the hours. One day we counted. We all do. Hell, the phone does it for us. Each of us that is dying a soulless viscous-death starts counting, quantizing, fearing. We counted. Probably four hours today of Scrolling, huh. Two-ish before work, two-ish after. To say nothing of the dead off-work television hours. Maybe five. On bad days and weeks, it's probably five of the hours per day of Scroll, Scroll, Scroll, Scroll, typetypetypetypetypetype, Scroll, Scroll.

And I am of the fortunate few!

Readers read with flashlights under the covers long, long after bedtime. They read on the bus and in the rain and sometimes in the shower, even.

And yes, they are a dying breed. The literacy rate is, and has been, and will continue to fall. Americans read less and less and less and less each year. Even the readers.

We re-habituate after breaking, after falling so low. And we do still know how to, thank the ancient gods and goddesses. We still know how to regain Time. We are lucky. No mas, we say. We shall only write and read. We will forget the passwords, lose the laptop, lock the phone away. And once the abstinence begins it snowballs, and soon social media is (until it rears that grotesque head six weeks down the line) in the rear-view.

But on the first day of detox? Torture, tortured torture from the everywhere! Like little knives in the penetrable base of the lizard-skull. How can it be that four pages in (to a book we adore) we mark the page and set the book down and say, “Hey! Ya know what we could really go for! Some Scroll! Ya know!?” It takes days after days after that first day to emerge, to remember that the happiest we can have is sitting, reading, bored, enthralled, universing, bullshitting, staring at the wall.

So, when the attention span has been shot in the temple and is bleeding out on the floor, what then? We break it right? Or try?

A dear friend said, ‘I’m tired of waking up, of coming up in a bad mood because of the phone. I’m tired of death-scrolling on the shitter, priming myself for sorrow’. And her words were a cartoon light-bulb. They say: heroin-like dependency.

So it must be absolution, ablution, and it must be abhorrence. Less stringent measures and we will return, as the domestically-abused lover to the I’m sorry you made me abuse you beloved. Any shot at mindless sin and we will sin — no doubt about it.

Certainly there are those among us who can balance it. They set time limits. When they want to Scroll, they Scroll, but when the time comes to not Scroll and return to the real world, they can. It is certain these people exist. Right? And yet all of our friends are readers, at times voracious, and all of our friends share in this addiction. Our parents, siblings, cousins. The first time my Grandpa showed up to Thanksgiving with a smart phone (the first time I had seen him use a screen in his life) he sat with his head in his lap scrolling facebook for 96 straight hours.

And when we do begin to emerge, excruciatingly, into the mindlessly mindful act of morning’s movements, not with Scrolling but with Chödrön, or the dang ol Lama hisself, or fucking Douglas Adams, or some nice Bradbury, or Woolf, or what the fuck ever, as long as it’s not Scroll, we feel good. Better. Not so hopeless.

Hell, reading the backside of a band-aid box is better for the brain than a fat fucking dopamine buzz of Scroll. Anything at all but this Oasis of Horror. This Desert of Boredom.

6th Missive: On Chess; On Television

The German chess grandmaster Jan Gustafsson is often quoted saying something to this effect: chess is an eternal and immutable struggle between not wanting to think and not wanting to lose.

Thinking — critically thinking — hurts. It feels like you are dying. David Foster Wallace wrote most of a whole-ass novel (The Pale King) about how focusing for even thirty consecutive seconds supremely sucks. Becoming good at chess sucks, I know. Calculation — raw, focused calculation — hurts. The COVID-inspired and Queens Gambit-inspired chess boom only lasted for 18 months because everyone who picked up chess as their Next Great Hobby realized the ceiling to their chess strength was extremely low, barring locking themselves in a room alone for a few years and memorizing a billion endgames and openings and solving 417,643 tactical puzzles, over and over and over again. The corner of the internet devoted to chess is filled to the brim with people asking how to get good at chess without studying Dvoretsky’s Endgame Manual; how to get good at chess without learning openings; how to get good at chess without having to put in the work; how to get good at chess while still scrolling for five of my sixteen hours awake each day. They wish to become good chess players; the doing proves terrifying and lonely.

Back to DFW again. He said that being a reader means being comfortable focusing, alone, in a cold and barren room, for hours and hours of your life (the clip wherein he brings this up — Charlie Rose or that German-TV interview or something — circulates social media nonstop, now isn’t that i-ron-ic?). Thomas Pynchon, one of the great living American novelists famously, after publishing a slew of novels nonstop from the mid-60’s to the mid-80’s, did not produce another work for 17 years because he was too busy living in seedy motel rooms throughout Southern California and Nevada getting addicted to daytime television. Cormac McCarthy lived in a shack behind a grocery store and cooked on a hotplate and may not have even had a landline. DFW had to throw away his computer and stop paying for cable in order to finish Infinite Jest.

And that’s television! That’s dial-up internet on a chunked PC! That was the nineties, 30 years ago! Television as a medium, when compared to social media on a smartphone, is weak, pathetic, and so easily defeated. The great postmodernists discerned and warned us about levels of convenience and addiction that we now scoff at — a thin-sauced phosphorescence moldering meekly under the unrelenting LED-lit infanticizing pox of social media.

26 years into the 21st century, TV looks ludicrously tame when held up to the smartphone. Nowadays we struggle to even watch television. We throw it on and then immediately pull our phone out to Scroll. 21 minutes of sitcom is too much for our attention span. Netflix has been accused of dumbifying their scripts; they know so few people are watching with intent or focus or uncompromised attention-spans that it ain't worth it to show nuanced non-plot-driven dialogue. If Pynchon and DFW openly did not stand a chance against a medium we view as comparatively frail, what chance do we stand in fighting off the exponentially more consuming cthulhulian horror?

The reason the newly-enamored masses so quickly lost interest in chess — upon realizing it involves spending long hours alone in heavy concentration — is the same reason no one reads or writes anymore, i.e. why the hell would they? How the hell could they? It’s too hard, too torturous. The prerequisite of a non-nuked attention span is far too demanding. When we had no smartphone, no mass media, and no TV it was justifiable, understandable that one would dedicate oneself to becoming a reasonably accomplished reader, or chess player, or linguist, or philosopher, or historian, or painter, or sculptor, or neon-bender, or poet, or anthropologist, etc., etc. What the hell else was you gonna do with your life, huh?

We had Time. We had more Time. We had nothing but Time, comparatively.

Now, if we were to stare down 24 consecutive hours of no internet and no TV, we would feel like Poor Tony in that Bostonian bathroom stall, enduring an involuntary withdrawal so overwhelming that we might stroke out and die, or just kill ourselves and save the trouble and suffering.

7th Missive: On the Audience; On The Self-Reference of the Algorithm

Here is a funny illuminating story: Me and the roommates, bullshitting on the back porch. One, a very Scrolly fellow, says, “Isn’t it ridiculous that Instagram decided to make half of my feed thirst-traps? What the fuck? I don’t need to see a bunch of barely-concealed Onlyfans accounts on my feed.”

And the rest of us fell about, cackling and snorting so hard we could not breathe.

It’s a solid reminder though, right?

The algorithm shows you more and more of what you watch, and not of what you don’t watch, and exclusively of what you watch. If you spend 30 seconds watching strip-teases, guess what your feed is going to look like tomorrow; guess what your feed is going to look like in five scrolls. Thus it stands to reason that my social-drip feed of García Márquez quotes and Bolaño quotes and a bunch of cosmology bullshit is my own doing. The algorithm knows what will keep me Scrolling.

But the literary accounts, the philosophy accounts, are not they echo-chambering round and round the ellipses of those who already find themselves firmly entrenched; dug into the echo chamber in the first place; shadow-banned to the realm of the loop-day dying, the last readers?

Query: Why would the algorithm ever reveal these anti-social-media accounts, these “get off of Instagram and go read” accounts, these “Derrida, Foucault, and the whole-ass rest of the allegedly Incorruptibles” accounts to anyone who is not already self-primed and self-selected and self-repeating?

Query: If, then, these accounts are for people who are already primed, who already suffer sorely of two lovely sicknesses they can’t shake (reading and scrolling about reading), then where do we stand? What's the fucking point?

We read about Paris in the twenties, or Mexico City in the seventies, or shit, we even read about Stalinist Russia in the early thirties, the Motherland’s stipends for artists and artist’s cafes, and we read Bulgakov or Mandelstam, and even then we find ourselves wretchedly jealous. Hey! we shout. We want to drink in the back of the bar and scribble and write with our friends and get into fistfights over a poem! Hey! We want long nights of reading and writing and bullshitting. Hey! We crave community, any community, please!

And there is social media, fronting as said-craved community. It’s in the damned name, no? But stuck in a virtual community we find, only ever-increasingly, imposter syndrome, self-hatred for not working enough, writing enough, reading enough. Deferring and deferring and deferring, waiting for the day when the numbing of the Scroll shall no longer prove preferable to sitting alone in a room with a book for a few years, or to establishing a writer’s workshop only ever attended by four or five lost and brave souls.

8th Missive: On Fear; On a Mental Health Crisis

If I have Eve Ball and Emily Dickinson and Julio Cortázar and a hundred other authors begging (begggggging, screaming, pleading) with me to sink into their soul-saving pages and find I cannot stop Scrolling, then what hope is there?

More importantly: What middle ground can exist when faced with such addiction? There are enough influencer accounts — of every genre and flavor under the sun — to ensure the infinite addiction of all beings.

I feel like Nancy Reagan: Just say No.

What curdles my stomach so: accounts, smart people, dedicated to telling me to get off of Instagram, to go read. I fucking can’t, yo! Precisely because of this lovely, hyper-engaging Content. Satisfy that there algorithm, baby. How can you tell me to get off of Instagram if you, too, are on Instagram?

The posts I encounter on social media nowadays warn me of the addiction of social media, and said posts are precisely and so perfectly addicting to make sure I Scroll away, down unto another post that warns of the addictive nature of social media and how I best get off it, and quick-like at that, which is just addicting enough to Scroll away, down…

Here is my fear, then: No content, however content-ful, can defeat the addiction of Content. Thirst-trap, lit-slop, engagement-bait: It’s all one and the fucking same.

This is how they enslave our now-vapid, now-weakened cognition. With the so tastefully curated Scroll. Finally! At long last!, we shout. Content! Tailored for me only!

It is capital “A” Addiction, plain and simple.

In 2024, New York City classified social media as a “public health hazard” and an “environmental toxin.” Stanford University described the effects of social media addiction as “a growing mental health crisis.” The World Health Organization published studies claiming that heavy digital media use results in reduced working memory capacity, in psychological problems ranging “from depression to anxiety and sleep disorders,” and in a reduction of reading comprehension. According to a study done by Common Sense Media, teens ages 13-19 spend on average nine hours a day on social media. Children ages 8-12 spend 6 hours on social media a day, and that since the introduction of the smart phone in 2011, depression rates have doubled among people 16-29, and suicide rates among children aged 10-14 have tripled.

You could, in truth, spend days and days reading papers on the multitudinous and nefarious effects of social media use, and come away from it scarred and depressed.

The dopamine hits that we have associated for 800,000 years with sex, food, and friendships — the real world — are now catalyzed through Scrolling.

9th Missive: On the Other Side; On Lynchian Boredom

Once I’m on the other side, the reading side, the minimal internet side, it all becomes laughably easy. We know that social media lowers attention span, erases gray matter, raises anxiety levels, depression levels, and feelings of loneliness. It also acts as a catch-all damper for boredom. Boredom, but lord knows not ennui. And boredom: just sittin’ there, doin’ utterly nothin’, lord, it's delightful.

For thirty years David Lynch drove down into the Valley to Big Boy’s Diner for a chocolate milkshake. Same time, same booth, every single day. And he would just sit there and daydream and stir his shake, and the worthy daydreams he would scribble hastily onto a napkin before he lost them. He once described losing an idea as “such a sadness”, and “that you’ll never feel worse than when you lose an idea.”

To truly have ideas, you need Time. Unadulterated, unedited Time. Non-obfuscated Time. To be a writer or reader you need focus. You need quiet. You need to be able to zone the fuck out. You need a mind that is capable of sustained periods of concentration and comprehension. And to reach out and catch ideas you need reflection. I’m never gonna find ideas in the Scroll. I ain’t yet.

Unfortunately I do not see any meaningful difference between “You won’t believe what this man did with only two steak knives and a blowtorch,” and, “Here are the 12 ways Marx would have hated the internet.” Social media encourages the gathering of little factoids, little sparks of dopamine, but it does not, and cannot, encourage anything beyond summarization, an idea of the idea.

As the weeks pass without access to the internet (outside of hauling myself down the hill to the library) I find myself spending more and more time bored, a most luxuriant boredom. Where before silence and boredom would bring forward the sub-cranial itch to Scroll, now I soak, relishing in the sun and the nothing. When my days are reading and writing and bullshitting with friends, they have discernible, sacred, non-dreadful length. In the evening I can trace the day backwards and find exploration, pages of notes, thousands of words written, hard-fought investigations, hundreds of pages read, 13 shouted dialectics, and I cannot wait to do it again the following day.

10th Missive: On Certainty

All we have left is the wasteland of the Media of the Social, and we are now fully cognizant of its detrimental effects on interpersonal and social well-being. The most depressed generation. The least literate. The most isolated.

And this redes sociales, these networks of the social?

Well, they’re owned by hegemonic oligarchs and shadow corporations that possess a wealth and influence quite literally never seen before on Earth. Promoters and entrepreneurs of lost and “rigged” elections, child pornography, racism, bigotry, sexual violence, neo-conservatism, hypersexualization, hyperreality, database consumption, virtue signaling, neoliberalism, polarization, radicalization, misinformation, sexual slavery, anti-environmentalism, corpocraticism, human trafficking, AI slop, globalization. I’ll stop with what I could think of in 60 seconds.

So, can we be certain that the dissemination of, and exposure to, philosophic and literary thought online justifies the medium it is translated through?

Can we be certain — in our social media promotion of literary thought, magazines, journals, etc., and the broader promotion of Great Works-reading — that we are not perpetuating the crushing machine?

The dope hit?

The sucrose at the end of the rat maze?

The tying-off of the ironic tefillin-strap for the free-based heroin hit?

Can we be certain — in freely handing over to Bezos and Musk and Zuckerberg our dinero and our Time — that we have not chucked our souls into a dumpster behind the 7/11?

Can we be certain that the influencer's viewers go on to truly read with vigor, given that Me, Myself, and All the Someones I Have Encountered admit to Not Reading, and Not Painting, and Not Writing because of the Instantaneous Gram?

Experience has shown I feel happier and more human and less suicidal when I’m not bound hand-and-foot, hooked on the life-drip of the Media of the so very Social.

I’d rather be alone with this sandstone and gravel backyard, reading and writing, than on There, where I find I have no Time. Only concept, no meaning.

11th Missive: On Baudelaire and Bolaño

Let us end here with a Baudelaire line from Les Fleurs du Mal, subsequently co-opted by Roberto Bolaño for the epigraph of 2666, that sums up social media use rather adroitly:

An Oasis of Horror in a Desert of Boredom

Bibliography:

Ables, K. (2024, January 25). New York City designates social media a public health hazard. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/01/25/nyc-social-media-health-hazard-toxin/

Common Sense Media. (2019, October 28). The Common Sense Census: Media Use by Tweens and Teens, 2019 | Common Sense Media. Commonsensemedia.Org. https://www.commonsensemedia.org/research/the-common-sense-census-media-use-by-tweens-and-teens-2019

Keles, B., et al. (2020). A systematic review: The influence of social media on depression, anxiety and psychological distress in adolescents. International Journal of Adolescence and Youth, 25(1), 79-93. https://doi.org/10.1080/02673843.2019.1590851

Korte, M. (2020). The impact of the digital revolution on human brain and behavior: where do we stand? Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience, 22(2), 101–111. National Library of Medicine. https://doi.org/10.31887/DCNS.2020.22.2/mkorte

Minamitani, K. (2024, May 20). Social Media Addiction and Mental Health: The Growing Concern for Youth Well-Being. Stanford Law School; Stanford University. https://law.stanford.edu/2024/05/20/social-media-addiction-and-mental-health-the-growing-concern-for-youth-well-being/