Losing an hour down a Wikipedia rabbit-hole is very different from scrolling through Reddit or Twitter the same amount of time. No matter how frivolous the topics on Wikipedia, I’m learning something new – even if I’ll forget most of it later the same day. With social networks the joy diminishes rather quickly, but I’m kept scrolling by some inexorable pull.
Both leave me surprised at where time’s disappeared, but one leaves me energised, the other with brain fog. The answer probably lies in that I float – flit? – through Wikipedia out of a sense of wonderment, and I scroll though social feeds out of a sense of compulsion. There seems to be more free will in one than another.