 Hello, Electro Magnetic Field. That's a lukewarm response. Hello, Electro Magnetic Field. Hey! For those of you who don't know me, I am Matt Gray. I'm at Matt Gray Yes on all of the socials. And I've been on that there, YouTube, for a bit. So I spent a lot of time on social media. Doing a lot of the scrolling, especially in the last couple of years, with nothing much to do. Hands up if you've spent a little bit too long doing the scrolling. That is everyone. I think that is everyone. Wow. So I am going to talk about my three steps to try and help stop doing the doom scroll, spending all of your time on it. Because we're all guilty of it. We've all spent too long doing it. Sounds too easy. Okay, the three steps. Number one, live. Number two, laugh. Number three, love. Now, first step is remove the doom. Step two, stop yourself from scrolling. And step three is find the reason that you are scrolling. So I'm going to go through each of those three steps. Now, you are seeing this presentation without slides. But I did only make the slides this morning because I'm used to having the advantage of video editing to support me. And I do that after I've done all the talking and I chop it all up so then all the good bits remain. So you're going to get to see the bad bits too. And I'm still on the path of recovery from post-viral fatigue at the moment. So there might be a moment where I just start buffering. So if I start buffering, you can fill that gap by giving me a round of applause. So that will take you long enough. And I'll maybe get a moment to think about what I'm trying to say. And then I'll be back again. So, social networks. I'm intrigued. Out of all the ones that we've got about the moment, which ones do you use? On the count of three, all of you at once, just yell what social network you use the most. Three, two, one. So I heard more Twitters than anything there. I thought I was going to be useless, but I heard a lot of Twitters. Wow. So hands up for Twitter. That's the majority of people. Facebook. Two people at the back there. Instagram. About half. TikTok. About the same as Instagram. Snapchat. One person at the back there. And finally, friends reunited. One person. I didn't even know it still existed. So for me, the main thing I use is Twitter and Instagram. It's probably just a sign of my age. They're the ones that have been around since long time. There's the buffering. I had already forgotten. I'd said that. So step one, remove the doom. So my experiences with Twitter mainly and Instagram. So I'm going to focus on that kind of thing, and then use these points on anything else you might be using. So first thing on Twitter, you can remove the doom. You're scrolling. There's a lot of crap there. There'll be the odd person that you always scroll past their posts and you never read them. Just unfollow them. Why? And the best thing about Twitter, and most social media right now, is that friendship is not mutual. If someone that you know follows you, you do not have to follow them back. And if they ask you about it, they go, nah, don't want that. I see you in real life. Done. And if, for whatever political reason, you have to follow them back, it's just going to make life easier, then you can mute them. They don't know that. More about muting later. So you don't have to read every post either. So once you've unfollowed all the people that you're scrolling past, well, you've got less to scroll anyway. And there is no point being completionist about the internet. You are never going to finish the internet. There will always be more internet. Has anyone here completed the internet? No, no one's completed the internet, so it's not going to happen. I used to try and complete the internet. I don't know why. I think it was just habitual scrolling. I'd get home from work at the end of the day and scroll Twitter until I ran out. It didn't do me any good. I didn't feel better at the end of it. So you just got to try and notice if you're doing that, then maybe try not to. There are more tools, though, that can help you. So Twitter, you can turn off retweets. If you didn't know that, if there's someone that's always retweeting something, turn it off. You'll only see the stuff that they're actually posting. And recognize some of the stuff that's getting slipped into feeds these days. So there's suggested posts, there's ads, fake notifications, that you get a notification because, hey, you last did this a year ago. It's not to remind you of the thing. They're not being nice. It's giving you that little rush of, oh, I've got a thing I've got something to look at. Like, Facebook is horrific at this. I rarely use Facebook, but when I do log in, there's always 100 notifications about bollocks that doesn't matter. I'm never going to click any of them. LinkedIn's the same. Not that I actually use that, but that's always full of notifications that I rarely check it. And Twitter does it in subtle ways too. Like, you can get a notification for every single time a tweet is liked. Now, I realize that's more of a problem in my end of things. As soon as you get more than maybe 10,000 followers, Twitter gets a little overwhelming. You don't need 10,000 people's opinion on everything you post. That works. The official Twitter app is awful at it as well. So the majority of my feed on the official Twitter app, it's likes. It's trends. It's big news. I don't go on social media to work out what's happening. I work in the media. I hear news. I hear news. I hear news. I hear news. I hear news. I hear news. I hear news. I hear news. I hear news. I hear news. I work in the media. I hear news throughout my day job, all day, every day. I get my news from reading different newspapers' websites. I get it from... I try and get a wide range of spectrum of opinions so I can form my own opinion. Whereas Twitter, I follow things that make me laugh, give me a break from the real world because I spend the whole time in the real world. The internet has always been my escape. And then as soon as big news happens, it starts coming in. And if Twitter's only showing me things people are liking and big trends, that means the news dominates the feed. And then Instagram's got a little bit better with the random crap it's shoving in your feed. I realise their algorithm seems to be completely different for everyone, but for me, I can reach the bottom of Instagram. I get the bottom and go, you've seen everything for the last three days. That's it. And it doesn't show me anymore, which is quite good. But I was sat next to someone two days ago and I didn't do that for them. So who knows? Facebook, eh? The other way of removing the doom is muting. So I don't use the official Twitter app. I use Tweetbot. It's iOS and Mac only, so sorry if you don't use them. I'm sure there's another alternative. But it has the advantage that you can mute users. You can mute specific phrases. You can mute hashtags. So I have mute filters set up for politicians' names. Words about nasty things that happen in news like violent acts, war, TV shows that I don't care about. None of that ends up in my Twitter feed. I'm specifically creating my own filter bubble, so then I don't see the nasty stuff and it can still be an escape. And that has taken me effort to do, but I have a much better time of it. I can have a break from the real world and I've created this filter bubble knowing that it's not my main source of news. So I've got things in, like, at the moment, Putin, NFT. I will never see anything that's saying NFT. It makes the internet a much better place. Oh, words like Reese Mogg referendum. Hashtag apprentice. I'm just scrolling through some of them now. Hashtag BBUK. When was the last time Big Brother was even on? I don't go through and clear them out. GBBO 2017. I should probably go through and clear them out because... Hashtag Harry and Meghan. Hashtag F1. People who like F1 seem to be the type of people who don't tweet. And then the F1 comes on. I don't see any of them because they're nice. They hashtag them. I've muted that hashtag. That's great. And these features are also available on other platforms. So Instagram, you can press and hold on someone's story at the top and you can mute either their story or their whole profile. So you can do it so then you won't see just the story things or you won't see anything from them, but you're still following them. Especially if you've got the political friendship reasons why you have to follow them, otherwise they'd be sad. But you don't have to follow them. Just unfollow them. It doesn't mean you don't talk to them anymore. YouTube has similar as well, so you'll get lots of recommendations of videos you might want to watch on YouTube. I will occasionally get lots of recommendations. Let's say I watched a video with some Lego in it. Lego is one of those topics that as soon as I watch one video on it, that's all it wants to recommend to me. It's a solar power. You suddenly get from one type of electronic engineering and bam, you're in van life. Everything's vans and you can't escape. Oh God, it's gone into composting toilet mode. And I don't want to go any further than so on composting toilet mode. I like my porcelain actually. I think plumbing is great. But what you can do is you can click the little dot dot dot and you can click don't recommend channel or not interested. And he goes, no, I don't like that topic. Do it on two videos. He doesn't want to spend four hours on a composting toilet build montage. And then it stops showing me it. It's nice. It makes it a better place. TikTok as well. Okay, not so many of you here are using it. I kind of like TikTok. Very addictive. It's an infinite scroll, so it's dangerous in that respect. But I find its algorithm is much better than any other social media's at working out what I want to watch and showing me more of it. I think it bases it a lot on dwell time and how long you're watching a thing. But if you press and hold a video on TikTok, there's the not interested button. For some reason, two weeks ago, it just kept showing me car crashes. Why is anyone uploading car crashes? I don't know. I said not interested on two of them but it stops showing me. It's great. You can craft what you're seeing online to not be the crap you don't want to see and makes the whole thing just a lot better and means you're less likely just to keep scrolling and scrolling forever for no reason. So we move on from stop, stop, step one to step two. So you've removed the doom. You've unfollowed people. You've muted everything. Now you need to stop scrolling. You can do it for a bit. But yes, you're starting to scroll the socials as easy. The hard bit is stopping. So that's step two. Staying up to date on current affairs. It's fine. It's great. Great thing to do. But you don't have to be immersed in it 24-7. There will always be more news. There will always be more internet. You will never complete the internet. You will never complete the news. Stay up to date. Check it every so often. But you don't have to keep refreshing to get the latest dip in, get a bit of it, and then you can leave again. Like I was saying, I try and keep treating the internet as my escape from the real world. Because there's enough bullshit out here without it needing to be in your space, in your bedroom, just as you're falling asleep seeing all the shit that's going on everywhere. And one thing that can help with this, like saying stop scrolling, yeah, yeah, that's really useful, yeah. But there are tools you can use to help you with that. So, screen time settings is what it's called in IOS. I'm pretty sure it's called screen time settings as well in Android. I don't know. I've never used one. But you can tell your phone, Oi, when I spent too long on this app, tell me not to. And you can get it to set a password and stuff on it. And I did, like, in the last few weeks and over the whole COVID thing, I've actually got a herty thumb from the amount that I've been on my phone. Got your more time spent sat inside and we sat on the sofa board because yes, we haven't been able to sit with each other in a field talking about geeky stuff. So my thumb has spent so long in this position here, it's hurt. So I've done things to stop me scrolling too much and now it hurts less. And you can end up in a habit loop of just constantly refreshing the same thing over, open that up, then I open that up, then I open that and you just end up in a loop. I re jiggled all of the apps on my home screen so I can't find them anymore. That worked wonders. I deleted the ones that are crap. I logged out of them. I turned on these screen time settings. So after one hour in Twitter official app or Tweetbot, it'll go, no, you spent too long in this app, it's now locked. You can enter in a password and we'll give you one minute or 15 minutes on it or we'll unlock it for the entire day. But that's a reminder. Yes, I'll end up going 15 minutes, 15 minutes, 15 minutes, but it's like a slap around the face every time I keep doing it and eventually it makes me stop a bit quicker than I would have done otherwise and you can do that for a specific apps or for categories so you can do it for all social media or everything on your phone. Hell, I even got into a point a few years ago where I was habitually refreshing Facebook on my computer so much. It was just a habit. There was nothing there. I didn't even like it. It was just an habit from it from having used it for 15 years. I ended up setting up a host file on my computer that pointed Facebook.com to local host. It just didn't work anymore and I kept doing the action and it just kept giving me nothing and then I slowly weaned myself out of that so it kind of did the job. And then number three, you have removed the doom. You have stopped yourself from scrolling and then the final bit is find the reason that you're scrolling. There's nothing wrong with spending time on things but if you're putting your all into it or if you're lying away until 3am constantly scrolling keep an eye on yourself. It's easy for it to become a habit. I've spoken about how that became a habit for me and the only way you can get out of that kind of habit is by noticing it or I've used it when I've been stressed or depressed. It's a distraction. You're not thinking about that anymore and you can't distract yourself forever. Your mental health is as important as your physical health so you need to take the same amount of care for it and if you need help with that, get it. Your friends will be happy to talk to you about it and if not then we have a wonderful health service here they'll be able to help you too. We've got the three steps. So, you've removed the doom there's less shit in front of you for you to scroll through so there's nice stuff there. You're not going to be scrolling as often and hopefully you keep an eye on yourself and you're not doing it for the wrong reasons to cover up the crap that's hiding in the back of your mind. Then you've got to remember the stuff that you're seeing on social media is all cherry picked. It's not the full aspect of the person. People are around. If you even do it yourself when you post a photo online you're not just picking any picture you're going which one's the good one oh look at that one I'm not going to use that one oh my eyes doing something funny in that one everyone does that people are a brand you will see someone's photos it looks like they're having fun all the time because why would you share the crap you're going to share the stuff you're excited about so you've got to remember that's not the full aspect of a person someone's annoyed one day about a thing and complaining about a thing it doesn't necessarily mean it's their all and same with beauty standards as well like I was saying it's one of 50 photos that someone's posted if they're a beauty influencer or a fashion influencer just before you let any of this kind of thing embed itself inside you you've got to remember to take that that's what it is it is a brand, it is marketing I've been on social media for 12 years now let's call it new in the grand scheme of the universe it's the new way of marketing humans at each other so there you go that's it really that's my waffle about how not to get embedded too much in the socials remove the doom stop yourself from scrolling and try not to do it for the wrong reasons I am Matt Gray I am Matt Gray yes on all the socials matg.co.uk I'm going to be around immediately after this talk because I've got to rush off but come find me come say hi I'm going to be around for the rest of the weekend and in the lounge which is the white tent near the bar I have a pile of Game Boys and a Game Boy camera that's connected to a dot matrix printer you can go there now you go have a play with them they're free to play I like Game Boys so feel free to have a play with them and that is it