For some time now, Twitter just hasn’t been fun. Don’t get me wrong: if you want to know what’s going on in digital archaeology (or whatever field) and you want to know what your peers are up to, it’s hard to beat.

But it’s been making me sick. It’s been making me anxious. It’s been eating far too much of my time. The world’s shitty enough as it is, without giving the shittiness a direct pipeline into my brain.

There’s no need to iterate all the bad ways Twitter serves to make the world a worse place, including its use of addictive design principles. It’s baked in, as they say: the trolls, the nazis, and Trump will never be booted off, because they generate clicks, they generate attention. Women and people of colour on the other hand…

So I’m taking a break. I’m trying. I’ve installed a site blocker on all my devices. In recognition that I’ve been such a heavy twitter user for so long, and that’s the principle vector for how some people collaborate with me, I have things set up so that I can check my DMs periodically. I did retweet some things related to singer-poet Gord Downie’s death, which as a Canadian of a certain age, well, you just have to do.

Other than that, I’ve been off Twitter for a week now. And dammit if I don’t feel more productive already…

If you need me, email me.

Feature image Vicko Mozara, Unsplash