Rules of Engagement (Design) — No. 00
Stuck in the Bird Bath
The hot stream of water falling from the shower head turned lukewarm 20 minutes ago, but I hadn’t noticed. Occasionally, large droplets of water would land on my phone screen and trigger a touch response, so I kept a towel by the edge of the tub to wipe my phone dry. The clock read 6:28 PM and I made a pact to put my phone down and hop out of that shower at 6:30. I had deleted TikTok a long time ago and I removed Instagram from my phone applications, but YouTube was an essential tool I could not surrender. After YouTube introduced its Shorts feature1, I had to work to keep my algorithm from falling into the toxic patterns of years past. These days, unfortunately, my scrolling isn’t allowed to be as mindless and carefree as I would like.
I was feeling overwhelmed from earlier in the day and tried to calm down using my Bird Bath method: sitting on the floor of my shower for at least 30 minutes while the hot water runs over me. After cutting horseback riding to save money, horse videos dominated my “Shorts” feed because they brought me great comfort. I watched a video of a woman galloping one of her horses through a field with her other horse in tow, kicking its legs giddily in the air.2 I looked at the clock again: 6:31. I had missed the deadline I had set for myself and decided “well, I guess I can just watch until 6:35.” In total, I probably spent 90 minutes watching short-form videos in the shower and didn’t feel any better than before.
I feel very fortunate that my landlord pays the water bill.
Because of my history (which will be covered in a later part of this series), I can recognize when I get into a video-consumption flow state. When I am in a delicate, vulnerable condition, I tend to keep something playing on a screen at almost all times. I am aware it’s bad for me when I’m doing it. The alternative, which is to be alone in my rumination, can be uncomfortable at best and dangerous at worst. When I was in the thick of it, the truth was that I was extremely unhappy in my circumstances and had tried about everything I could to improve them with no luck. I wanted to fast-forward through time.
That’s all to say, I now tend to have a much healthier relationship with my phone when I feel more fulfilled in my life. Yet, when I’m feeling lost or lonely, which comes in long waves, I allow myself to cave into my primal desires: play video on big screen, work on medium screen, and look at small screen.3 All at the same time.
Around 2020, I had a relationship with social media that was detrimental to my body and brain. I used to get stuck in these loops of feeling bad and scrolling for information that would make me feel good, but I would just stumble upon information that made me feel worse, and become more determined to find good information.4 Nowhere in this process did my feelings get resolved. After the damage was already done, I became really upset at how I LET myself get sucked into my phone. I felt irresponsible, guilty, and stupid for giving into these impulses. I look around me and see others in the same cycles. I see it in my loved ones still. These days I no longer judge them, because I learned that this impact on our behavior was by design and that this design was extremely profitable for companies. The design I’m talking about is called engagement design.
Footnotes
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A Short Short-Form-Video Timeline:
2012: Vine is founded and then later acquired by Twitter.
2013: Vine launches on the app store. The 6 second video limit breeds innovation in slapstick we haven’t seen since like, Buster Keaton. Thus begins the era of mobile-native social media stars.
2014: Musical.ly launches, allowing users to create and post 15-second to 1-minute lip syncing videos.
2016: Vine announces shut down. The world mourns. ByteDance launches Douyin in China (the predecessor structure to international TikTok).
2017: ByteDance launches TikTok internationally. ByteDance acquires Musical.ly, which grew to over 200 million users.
2018: Musical.ly accounts are consolidated into TikTok. Musical.ly is retired.
2020: TikTok explodes and other social media apps follow suit. Instagram introduces Reels and Snapchat introduces Spotlight. YouTube Shorts launches beta in India.
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