Notifications

My typical morning, excluding shabbos, begins with a screen once the preliminaries of dental care, newspaper retrieval, and a k-cup brew have been completed.  Restrict Social Media appears on my Daily Task List essentially automatically.  And I really do limit my access, though from time to time I will concentrate on either FB or r/Judaism as a personal focus.  But once coffee has been placed within reach of my laptop in My Space, I seek my notifications.  There are five:  emails, FB, Reddit, Twitter now Rated X, and my stats on Medium Daily Digest.  There's a habit to this, though an ambivalent one.  As Loneliness becomes rampant, with our devices as prime villains, there is a certain irony to the first connection to other people each morning should come from how people responded to us on our screens. Designers of these platforms, including psychology majors, have as their business models the attention time to their offerings preferentially to competitors' options.  And they helped create Loneliness so they know which crumbs to toss to offer a very transient reprieve.

All five forums for me are a little different.  Email is by far the most important, though very few messages come from people I know or from organizations I asked to contact me.  Still, there is frequently something from my wife or financial advisor that needs action.  Some of the passive notifications I solicited indirectly, whether notifications from the synagogue, receipts for payments that I made electronically, subscriptions of various types.  And then there are the unwelcome, transferred to spam, deleted without opening, unsubscribed after opening, or more often than not, just not opened.  And on occasion I will also find a notification that somebody else on another forum responded to a comment I had made on that other platform.

Next most important, though probably expendable, is Facebook.  It has taken an ugly transformation in the fourteen years since I subscribed.  FB's initial attraction was to reconnect with old friends and relatives.  Being some forty years past HS graduation, there was a not entirely healthy curiosity about where the decades had taken the people I once interacted with daily in the classroom, school bus, or gym class.  Most volunteered what they were up to.  I became closer to some that first year on FB than I was in HS, even got to see a few.  After establishing about a hundred FB style quasi-Friends, the number of contacts atrophied one or two at a time.  The nominal connections are still there if I ask for my Friends List, but the number of people who post in a way that reaches my daily passive screen has dwindled to just a few.  It has been replaced by algorithms, computer matches which my own keyboard use helps generate, or a perhaps degenerate, which then post things people want to sell me, donations I might like to consider for either causes or candidates, or updates on my preferred teams.  The real people no longer offer short posts about their lives or what they do, other than photos of destinations they are visiting as they visit them.  Still, every morning I can count on an icon that appears designed after the Liberty Bell with a red number next to it.  Open the bell, and I will get a summary of who liked something I had posted or commented upon. In a world of mostly Zero Responses, these are rarely zero.  And the Likes or related emotions nearly all originate with somebody I know personally.  Moreover, somebody on occasion exchanges an idea.

My Reddit feed differs a bit.  Anonymity is built into the platform and it is moderated for propriety, usually successfully.  Like FB, it has a Liberty Bell with a number attached to it.  However, it is a more multifunctional bell than FB's.  It does not ding for each like, but instead milestones of likes:  5, 10. 25. 50. That's as high as I've gotten, though I'm confident others have gone viral with the bell reflecting that.  It notifies me in duplicate when anyone has verbally responded to a comment that I have made.  One number appears next to the bell with a link to take me to the faux conversation, another notification is directed to my email Inbox.  And then there are unsolicited rings of the bell, comments that their algorithm personalizes to me, thinking I might want to read them, though I am not a participant in that Subreddit.  The bell gives me two options, other than going to that conversation.  I can delete the comment, my most typical response.  Or I can ask for no more notifications from that entire Subreddit, which I also do less frequently.  And while my preferred destination is r/Judaism, when I log on I get a Home feed with a lot of other topics other than my personal subscriptions.  Depending on interest, I will respond to some, an invitation to more notifications from that group, even though I am not enrolled in it.

While I do not know anyone on Reddit by platform design, I am quite helpful to a lot of other posters seeking knowledge and experience.  People come testing the waters of Judaism.  They are attending synagogue for the first time, maybe have let their connection to Judaism become dormant and would like to revive it.  We have guests from the Christian and Islamic world who wish to pose a polite question.  Being helpful to somebody else is one of the best defenses to established Loneliness, something Reddit enables far more than any other forum to which I subscribe.  And in some ways the comments, which are not length restricted, can be developed into forms of conversation.

The most problematic forum is Twitter, that public cesspool of ideas which unfortunately also had people of real public influence present in some way.  There are not many ways to give feedback to a journalist, elected official, top executive, or major scholar.  All generate hundreds of responses.  I know almost nobody personally, though many by reputation and by their public presence.  Likes are few, maybe one every few days, and rarely from the person of public prominence.  What I find, though, is that somebody of obscurity will read my comment and opt to follow me further.  These people, when their profiles are accessed, will typically be following 4000 people but have under 100 who follow them.  By contrast, I follow 37 and have 34 who have chosen to follow me. I cannot think of a more overt identification of Loneliness than seeking anyone who comes along randomly while attractiven nobody else in return.  I almost never initiate a political post, mostly share something I've written on my feed.  I've also deleted many a public figure, including some who have the most to say.  The reason, they post something every ten minutes through their waking hours.  And it arrives in my feed as clutter, since they say pretty much the same predictable things for every one of those q ten minute posts.  As a result, my time of that forum is severely rationed.  My most common Follow is The Atlantic, to which I have a subscription, and most common comment is a response to an article I have read there.  Responses in return have been minimal.  

Finally, I self-publish fifteen or so articles each year on Medium, which comes across as a daily digest.  While a freeloader, I have a handful of people who subscribe to my feed, and a small handful of people who read what I have written, or at least open the article.  While never a lot, there is always a measure of gratification to contributing to somebody else's mind.  I do not know these people and get close to zero comments in return.  But it takes only moments each morning to check.

So knowing how I relate, or really how my mind relates to people known and unknown, has an allure that seems difficult to set aside, though I do set it aside for Shabbos every Saturday.  I'm part of cyberspace.  The magnates who control cyberspace want me as part of it, which is more than I can say for people I know in person or through organizations who have done their best to exclude me.  It does not take a lot to feel included.  Mostly a bell shape on a screen with a single digit in red next to it.