Shortly before Patton Oswalt Tweeted that he was going “radio silent” on his social media accounts on June 1, he had become a pioneer in ironic trolling. Between his “Deleted Tweet experiment” and his #YesAllWomen Tweet, the comic managed to ruffle the feathers of so many people who have no senses of humor and don’t understand that they’re being baited, as well as many other people who simply don’t think that the 45-year old is very funny. Ultimately, it wasn’t the stupidity of others that caused Oswalt to pack up shop for the summer, as much as it was his own behavior that had him concerned.
“I’ve become my own tyrant,” Oswalt wrote in an essay on Facebook on June 1. “Tweeting, and then responding to my own responses, and then fighting people who disagree with me. Constantly feeling like I have to have an instant take on things, instead of taking a breath, and getting as much information as I can about the world.” Oswalt referred to this hiatus – a break from June 1 to September 2, to be accurate – as “engineering a summer” or a process to “de-atrophy the muscles” he once had, so he could spend more time reading and watching movies, and less time arguing with faceless strangers on the Internet.
Today, according to my Hooters Girls calendar, is Sept. 2, and like clockwork Oswalt is back in action, already making light of the leaked nude photos of countless female celebrities and Cee-Lo Green’s rape “debate” with his followers. More importantly, he Tweeted the link to an essay that he wrote for TIME that further explains why he spent (most of*) the last three months away from Twitter and Facebook, and why he wants this to be something that he and many others attempt at least once a year.
I really enjoyed these three months away. Slowly weaning myself off of social media has, ironically, made me feel younger. At least, I have the habits of a much younger person now. I used social media—at least for these past 90 days—at the frequency of a 20 year old. Occasionally, like it wasn’t some exotic novelty, and didn’t need to be consumed like a wine whose supply was finite.
Here’s a thought—what if the next fashionable rebellion, from whatever generation rears its head after the millennials, is to become “unlinked.” Only reachable face-to-face. Hmm.
I think I’m going to do this every summer. June 1 to post–Labor Day. Eyes up, logged off. Remember how, in The Matrix, mankind had become batteries, so the machines could feed off of us? Well, it’s happening now, just 140 words at a time. It’s too late to go back, but you can carve out three hot months to recharge. (Via TIME)
Oswalt also described the process of quitting social media cold turkey, so to speak, for this break. While I’m not sure if he’s kidding or not, the comic claims that in the first week, he “dropped 15 pounds… built a sustainable small-yield garden for my daughter, and learned knife throwing.” Joke or not, knife throwing is probably a skill that all of us could benefit from, so we should be inspired at the very least. But as anyone who has lost a cell phone for even a day can attest, not having that instant distraction in the palm of his hands was seemingly the hardest part.
He admitted that he was “silently lurking on Twitter early on,” looking at his mentions and reading other people’s feeds. Checking your mentions is already mostly a terrible thing, because that’s where all of the bad stuff lurks. Hell, I never check my own, because I’m overly annoyed by the mean things that people say about me. It’s bad enough that I have to deal with insults from my friends and family, so I leave the strangers in the void. I can’t even imagine what the mentions look like for a polarizing comic with 1.8 million followers, but you can bet that they’ll be livelier than ever now that he’s back in business, tossing out chum to all of Twitter’s dumbest trolls.
First thing’s first, though… someone needs to nominate Oswalt for the Ice Bucket Challenge.
*He Tweeted his thoughts on Ferguson and Robin Williams’s suicide, but so did everyone else, so we’ll let those slide.