Today Is Not the Day

9 minutes

Kids ages four to 15 now spend an average of 85 minutes per day watching YouTube videos, compared with 80 minutes per day spent on TikTok.

Kids spend 85mins a day on Youtube and 80mins on TikTok.

I was looking at the original report. I couldn’t figure out if these numbers were separate or additive. It’s in addition to each other. 80mins a day for 30days is 2400mins a month – or put another way ~40 hours. Over 80 hours if you combine the two. Nearly two working weeks a month. Consuming media online is basically your job.

The longer you work for the social platforms the more money they will make. I can’t belive such a large proportion people I follow online think NFT’s are stupid/have no real value or whatever. When their own attention is for sale, abstracted away in to impressions and MAU’s. Their eyeballs have a price, a value, and an exchange rate. Yet no one seems to want to admit it, or talk about it at all.

Did you know that if you spent more then 4mins a day on Twitter, you spend more time on the hell site than half of all other Twitter users in the based in the UK. Just 4mins on the bird site puts you in the top 50%. It takes longer than that to log in, and reply to a single DM.

My own daily average time spent on the bird site (since April 2020) is currently 8mins and 7mins respectively. Down from ~14mins in October of 2020.

This is still twice the UK average.

I think back to 2015/2016ish when all the Brexit / Corbyn madness was going on. How many hours did I spend on social media then? I must have spent more than a working week looking at social media whilst I was supposed to be working.

I am still disgusted at at myself for sitting on a paradise beach in Bali and realising I could just get the hotels wifi, and bingeing on Twitter for half a day when I could have been … just enjoying my life.

I don’t have many regrets in my life but that is one of them. Whats worse is that I knew at the time that I would regret my behaviour, but still did it anyway.

REGRET LOCATION

I know that lots of people use social media as an escape – a place to spend time away from their daily lives.

A place to find community, information and support. For a long time I used to escape to social media for all those reasons too. In 2008 it was exciting by it. By 2012ish I’d met lots of now IRL friends first on Twitter – many of whom are still my friends now.

But I realised that escaping to social media, was just exacerbating all the things in my life I was trying to escape from.

As soon as one becomes aware of ones own complicity it becomes difficult to ignore. Self shaming doesn’t work, taking full responsibility for ones attention only goes so far. So you tell yourself (once again) that today is the day you’re going to try and check out of the socials and get on with your life.

It’s just like smoking. “Today it turns out, is not that day that I am going to give up” you say as you take the first (wonderful) drag on the first cigarette of the day. In my current state of mind, I’m willing to say that cigarettes are better than Twitter. At least more enjoyable anyways.

I find myself watching fucking short viral videos on Instagram Reels or Youtube Shorts. I’m shaken out of it when the app timer runs out at 20mins. I shake my head and suspect that the short video format environment is actually a social ill. The format is now so inescapable, it really is addictive UX.

Kids growing up right now are spending a whole working week on Youtube and another working week on TikTok. Complicity with the way things have gone since the optimism of the mid 2000’s is literally a full time job.

Meanwhile journalists spend hours and hours on Twitter too. The shit eating feedback loop continues. Everyone is now so full of shit that even the New York Times thinks its employees should stop going up to the buffet.

I spent so much time growing up as an elder millennial despising the TV-as-idiot-box that I totally missed that the small square of dark glass I carry around with me all day was actually worse. I mean, at least the one show isn’t broadcast live from a literally hellmouth.

Then again, the average Brit still spends 192mins a day watching TV. 22.5 hours a week, or 90hrs a month. Presumably everyone is on their phones at the same time too. Folks can rot their brains watching Bake Off, whilst telling a stranger to kill themselves on Twitter at the same time. What a world!

I dunno. I don’t have a particular point to todays post in all honesty. But I just look around and everything and it all seems like such a fucking huge waste of life and human potential.

Especially my own.


Photo 365

091/365

Permanently Moved

The Theatre’s Royal

Have you ever wondered why so many towns and cities in Britain have a building called the Theatre Royal? I have.

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

Been a week of two halves this week.

  • More planning and structuring of my creative projects and what needs to be done
  • Dreaming about the things I could do,write,create if I wasn’t a a coward about what people think about me lol
  • Lots of cool convos with people who responded to my invite to collab!
  • Planning with folks the courses I’m teaching which are all coming up fast.
  • More band practice, more music making.
  • Reading more and more about CRPGS.

Dipping the Stacks

‘Night luxe’ is the aesthetic set to define our roaring twenties – i-D

RIP to That Girl – her reign of wellness terror is over.

The death of Ideals | Esmé Partridge | The Critic Magazine

Goblin mode — and the nihilism that it represents — is the final destination of this anti-idealism, and last nail in the coffin for the world upheld by Platonism. It marks the abandonment of human life as a quest for meaning and the ideals that allow ordinary people to live healthy, happy and productive lives.

NeRF Research Turns 2D Photos Into 3D Scenes | NVIDIA Blog

1,000-year-old oaks used to create ‘super forest’ – BBC News

These native oak trees, which can support hundreds of different species of insects, birds and fungi, will be needed in the race to reforest the UK. ​​Britain remains one of the least wooded parts of Europe.

China’s Gig Workers Are Challenging Their Algorithmic Bosses | WIRED

Food delivery drivers are using platforms’ data-powered systems, mass WeChat groups, and unofficial unions to fight unfair conditions.

Reading

I finished reading Revolt of the Public this week. I’d recommend it to anyone who wants to understand how all the people that read this book 5/6 years ago have been thinking about our current predicaments. I enjoyed the final chapter- the afterward. Written after the books first publication, it address Trump. Brexit, and Euro-Maiden in Ukraine (look how thats turned out).

The newest Warhammer 40k – Gaunt’s Ghosts audiobook, Traitor General narrated by Toby Longworth dropped last weekend. I dropped what I was doing and listened to the whole thing at the top end of the week. Cleared the whole book Sunday-Tuesday! It was a cool special forces/secret mission style story and ends in a most unexpected way. I wonder if its a two parter?

I bought The Power of the Name: The Jesus Prayer in Orthodox Spirituality by Bishop Kallistos-Ware a while back and finally read it over two evenings before bed. It’s a wonderful book about the power of stillness and prayer. It remarkable how much meaning you can tease out of a 12 word prayer. I was gratified reading the book, that I had experienced/considered some of the subjects topics. Like the Christocentric and Trinitarian nature of the Jesus prayer. It’s something you just ‘feel’ – you don’t need to be told.

I’m still plugging away at Dungeons and Desktops: The History of Computer Role-Playing Games. Nearly done. I really want to play some of these old games. I’ve installed the Atlantis client on my Mac and I think I might livestream playing a MUD maybe?

Music

thejaymo.net Spotify Playlist

Ethel Cain – Gibson Girl

Ethel Cain is one of my favourite artists working/writing/doing right now. Last years Inbred EP was incredible.

Gibson Girl is the first single of Cains new album Preacher’s Daughter due out in May. As with her previous tracks the song is soundstory heavy. You can hear sadness, landscape, parties, cigarettes, music and tears throughout this track. The back 3rd fall in to lush full frequencies and an emotional guitar solo, tucked just underneath the vocal refrain in the mix.

I can’t wait for the full album next month. Cain’s brand of southern gothic pop rock is my kind of thing. It ‘rocks’ me. Literally. No UK dates announced yet. But as soon as she’s over I’m getting tickets.

Heinali: live from a bomb shelter

I’d like to direct your attention towards this absolutely electrifying live set by the Ukrainian composer Oleh Shpudeiko AKA Heinali. Streamed live to Youtube from a bomb shelter in Liviv.

This is wartime music in 2022. Haunting, mournful, tragic, but also optimistic and contains hints of joy. Never have generative bleeps and bloops sounded so sad.

Heinali’s 2020 album Madrigals (like the live set above) is an exploration of generative counterpoint using modular synthesis. Based on the polyphonic compositional style of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance it conencts past present and future in ways that can only be experienced by deep listening.

Remember Kids:

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  1. […] get sucked into short form videos, unless you’re making […]

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