CS 247B Measuring Me Take 2: Into the Twitterverse
The biggest change in my online behavior since the pandemic started has been my introduction to Twitter. From exploring political and epidemiological punditry to getting a pulse on current affairs to laughing at viral tweets, I’ve found Twitter to be not only entertaining but perhaps even useful to deal with and understand the messy and confusing times that we live in. However, this penchant for current events and “the now” that Twitter holds is both a gift and a curse, because given how much news there is these days, one can look at Twitter again and again in the same day or even hour and still find new fresh content. I usually justify my Twitter usage based on how much I’ve learned from reading threads and links shared on the platform, but I suspect that I could have gotten the same information in much less time by just reading articles directly on news sites and blogs. I would like to cut down on my Twitter usage, or at least streamline it so that the time spent on it is actually spent meaningfully instead of just doomscrolling.
Because I usually use Twitter for just a few minutes at a time, it didn’t show up on my previous Measuring Me assignment very much since that was based on 15-minute intervals. For this round, I decided to get a more accurate representation of my usage by using a Chrome extension to track Twitter.com time and Screen Time on my phone to track the app time. Because I didn’t have to do anything special to write down my activity in these apps, I was hoping that the action of tracking wouldn’t affect my behavior too much. And, low and behold, I actually forgot that I was even tracking this, so I think it worked.
WARNING! Blatant mischaracterization ahead: It turns out that I don’t spend as much time on Twitter as I thought I did. Nominally, it was only about 20–30 minutes a day.
Here’s the catch: although I might not spend that much time reading tweets, for each “article tweet” that I read, I spend at least a couple minutes outside of the app reading it, which adds a considerable amount of time to the overall “Twitter distraction.” Sometimes, a tweet might inspire a long and windy browsing session, like yesterday when I spent nearly half an hour reading about the new COVID strains to fact-check an alarming tweet. What’s more, I think the act of visiting Twitter or checking my phone negatively affects my productivity on the surrounding tasks as well, because I lose my flow and force a context switch. I represent these lurking issues in the iceberg diagram below.
Twitter usage is very identifiable and easy to notice, but I think it’s part of a bigger issue I have with browsing more generally. I spend way too much time reading about topics that I really don’t need to know about. Next time, I think I’ll try to better focus on this problem by measuring my web browsing as a whole.
