Warning: What you are about to read is probably the nerdiest sentence I’ve ever written. And I write some pretty nerdy fiction.
Here goes:
I’ve been doing a deep dive into the theories of psychogeography lately for an upcoming academic publishing project, and it’s really sent me down a mental rabbit hole about the significance and power of liminal spaces.
Okay. Okay. Deep breath. We made it through that, together.
I share that context because liminal spaces aren’t something we spend a lot of time thinking about, but we interact with them over and over and over again, every single day. If you’re not familiar with the term, a “liminal space” is essentially a physical point that serves as a transition between two different and juxtaposed spaces.1Doorways, for example; they exist as the connection between two rooms, or between the interior and the exterior. When you walk through a doorway, you transport yourself to another place, another purpose, another experience. Even within the walls of your own home, each room tends to have its distinct purpose. In our house, one doorway connects the dining room to the living room; another connects several different rooms to one common arterial space; another connects the kitchen, a place where we chop vegetables and sear steaks and boil pasta, to the sunroom, where we sit and relax in the sunshine and watch our daughter play with her Lightning McQueen racer. Each space is distinct; the liminal spaces of the doorways connect them.
We cross through countless liminal spaces every single day. That line between grass and sidewalk? That’s a liminal space. The tiny gap between the platform and the train? Liminal space. The gate in your fence that leads to the alley and the point where the sand ends and the water begins? You guessed it. Liminal spaces.
And the more I think about it, the more I see social media as a liminal space, too.
The internet is a real thing, a virtual universe of information and energy. It is a true space. But we, as humans, can’t actually go into that space. We can view user-friendly versions of it through our screens, but unless you’re Keanu Reeves in a trench coat, you can’t get into the internet. We live in the physical world, while the content we engage with exists in the virtual world, and every time we’re scrolling, tapping, typing, or sharing, we’re engaging in a liminal space, an uncrossable threshold between worlds.
If you’re like me, you spend more than four hours a day at that threshold. (Thanks, Screen Time app!) A lot of my students sit at eight, nine, twelve hours. I once had a student whose average—average—daily screen time was 16+ hours. It’s true. She proved it. She showed me her phone. It shook me to my core2
Anyway. What I’m saying is, when we engage with digital platforms, we’re really camping out in a type of liminal space. And I think that looking at our relationship to social media through this lens might actually help explain why that relationship tends to be so complicated.
Think about what it would be like if you spent five hours a day in a physical liminal space that caught your attention in the same way social media does. Here’s an exercise: Imagine that you walk up to a huge, walled estate with a locked gate. Beyond the gate, on the estate property, is a massive cocktail party. Your family is there. Your friends are there. Your favorite celebrities are there. A bunch of people you went to high school with but don’t really talk to anymore are there. You can hear what they’re saying, and they can hear what you shout to them, and they can respond to you, but you can’t actually go into the party. The gate is locked, and all you can do is stand there for hours each day and watch them as they show you all the various ways in which they’ve living their best lives and throwing out their best sociopolitical zingers. You’re seeing it all, engaging with them through the bars though you can’t actually get to where they are. But you can’t look away, either. You stand at the gate, and though you sometimes do walk away and focus on your actual life—work, family, transit, food—you find yourself walking back over to the gate every twenty minutes and watching, yearning to be on the other side. Sometimes you go to the gate in the middle of the night, when you can’t sleep. And you always return the next morning. You spend ¼ of your life standing in that gate, unable to cross into the party, but also not able to focus on what’s going on behind you, in the World.
Or, tl;dr: Imagine you stand in a doorway for five hours a day, quasi-engaging with the people in the room on the other side, and that’s the most fun thing you can think to do.
Liminal spaces aren’t meant for semi-permanence. They’re meant for transition. They’re created to serve as portals for our movement, not cocoons for our stasis. In the real world, we pass through liminal spaces quickly, easily, and often without a thought. In our interactions with the virtual world, we set up mental camp and distract ourselves with a world we can’t fully immerse ourselves in, while we let the particulars of our actual world fade into a background blur3
If we spent as much time as we spend on the internet in actual, physical doorways, unwilling or unable to move into either one space or the other, the result would be anxiety, fear, and an unhealthy detachment from our day-to-day lives.
Our time spent with our devices often offers us the same bill of goods. One of the steps to enjoying social media more is actually consuming it less. Spend less time on social; connect more with the world; enjoy the space you build for yourself on social. The things that tend to keep our attention on social platforms are anger (which we’ve talked about, and will talk about more), FOMO (which we haven’t talked about yet, but it’s coming!), a need to be connected, and a need to be informed. The last two points are some of the best use cases for social media, and we’ll explore some specific tactics to help you filter out the noise and connect and inform yourself in meaningful, intentional ways. (I’ve already posted a few times about this, one great example is Facebook and the Art of Bonsai, if you missed it!) If we can remove, or at least mitigate, our anger, and if we can reframe our FOMO, and if we can connect meaningfully, and if we can receive useful information, then we can maximize our time on social media while being tempted to use social media less.
That’s the goal. And we can do it.
The first step is to recognize the internet as a liminal space. The next step is to ask yourself if you’d rather spent your life in a doorway or out in your world.
Second-nerdiest sentence I’ve ever written. I’m having a banner day!
I’ve never felt more like Walter Donovan in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. You know, when he drinks from the False Grail and goes all dead. I died a little that day.
I do realize I’m sort of inadvertently championing the metaverse here, and that’s something I’m going to think about for a bit.