Social Media is to Be Grappled With

Research shows that young people are more anxious and depressed than 20 years ago. Rates of suicide and self-harm in teenage girls have increased drastically in the last decade. These increases coincide with the birth of the internet and, more recently, social media.

This doesn’t exactly come as a surprise. I have sensed an increased cultural awareness of social media’s harmful side effects in recent years, thanks in part to mainstream documentaries such as The Social Dilemma. But we all keep using it anyway. It’s like a drug addiction in so many ways: we tell ourselves we can go without it for X amount of hours/days/weeks, but we are back on it again before we know it, thinking ‘it’s not really a big deal, I could go without it at any time if I really wanted…’

I’m not here to trash social media. I have used it for years, and while I’m on a current hiatus from Instagram and Twitter, I’m sure I will resume use in the future. I think it is such a valuable tool in many ways: for connection, representation, learning and awareness. But it also comes with a whole host of drawbacks. It must be taken with a pinch of salt, and used in moderation. Which is hard, because it’s quite literally designed to manipulate our brain’s chemical reactions, to be addictive. And it’s developing at a rate that our brains simply can’t keep up with – not from an evolutionary perspective, anyway.

I’m interested in being analytical and perceptive when it comes to social media, becoming aware and informed of its pitfalls and not taking it at face value. I suppose this in itself is my poor brain’s own attempt to keep up with its exponential development.

I quit most social media a few months ago, during the uncertainty of the increasing presence of COVID after the summer lull, an increase that no one seemed to be acting on at the time. There was something about being bombarded with other people’s lives at a time when mine was becoming increasingly insular and anxious, and I think social media in part contributed towards that anxiety, and anger, at a world I had little to no control over.

But it’s not even other people’s lives, not really. It’s a carefully-curated highlights reel. Even when we know this, though, our awareness can easily drown in the sheer barrage of imagery that is pelted at us as soon as we pick up our devices. But I’m not here to preach. I’m sure I will return to social media one day, just as soon as I’ve figured out how to maintain a healthy relationship with it.

On being perceived and perceiving others

Humans have always been concerned with how others perceive them. How we are viewed by others forms a significant chunk of our own identity, whether we like to admit it or not. It is normal to be concerned with how our actions or looks might come across to others. But social media has garnered a culture of hyper-perception. In having a social media account, we are dealing with being perceived by so many more people than we would ever have to deal with on a daily basis otherwise. There is an anxiety created in the knowledge that even as I sit alone, someone could be viewing me digitally, forming a reaction to and judgement of my online identity. It is a type of surveillance that guides and influences our behaviour to an incredible degree. The danger, then, comes when our actions and choices are guided not by our inner desires, but by how they might come across under social media’s gaze.

So often, people post on social media to control or influence how people see them, and this is a somewhat natural instinct. Having these accounts gives us a way to express the best parts of our identity to others. The problem is, so many things on social media instead affect how people view themselves. In their actions on social media, people usually only think in terms of how they will be perceived, not in how the receiver of their post will then perceive themselves in relation to this. Someone posts a picture of themselves, because this, in their head, will result in them being perceived as attractive/popular/friendly/fun/quirky (fill in the blanks as required).

What they don’t dwell upon, however, is how this may make someone else feel inadequate by comparison. And, as social media receivers, we are confronted with possibly hundreds of these pictures on a daily basis, often without sparing a thought for their effects on how we view ourselves. We are always pushing our image out there, for consumption by others. But in doing so, we are becoming consumed, becoming part of this culture of hyper-perception. Faced with a barrage of other people’s highlight’s reels, we battle internally with our own image and identity.

It is normal and human to be conscious of your image in relation to others. But we have to be aware of how social media intensifies this comparison, if we are not to fall victim to the deep unhappiness that this can cause.

Daydreaming

But where do we turn when we feel unhappy or uncomfortable? What can help us to switch off from these feelings and turn our focus towards something else? You guessed it.

Our devices follow us everywhere and offer us distractions from boredom and unhappiness. We turn to them on public transport, as we walk from A to B, when we are about to go to sleep, during a crisis, even when we are conversing with others.

I think there is a danger in this. We are constantly distracted. We don’t daydream as much, we can’t sit with our feelings and investigate them for even a second before the next ping of a notification, before the instinctive hand reaches out to pick up and scroll. Pausing, noticing and appreciating what is around you, or letting your mind wander, are often vital to nurturing good mental health.

What are we heading towards if the source of our unhappiness is rooted in social media, but social media is what we turn to to distract us when we feel unhappy?

Boredom has morphed into something that we see as negative, something to be prevented and avoided at all costs. But boredom can lead to creativity, imagination and innovation. By eliminating boredom, are we stifling creativity within ourselves?

Junk values

Johann Hari, in a super interesting TED Talk, discusses how ‘junk values’ are being perpetuated by this online world of consumer-based culture. He discusses the findings of Tim Kasser, whose research found that ‘the more you believe you can buy and display your way out of sadness, and into a good life, the more likely you are to become depressed and anxious. And secondly, as a society, we have become much more driven by these beliefs. All throughout my lifetime, under the weight of advertising and Instagram and everything like them’.

We have become a society influenced by the belief that if we are unhappy, we can just buy that one extra thing, or display an idealised image of ourselves to others and receive validation, and feel better. But this is in fact what is fuelling our anxiety, because, in the grand scheme of our lives on this planet, these things are not truly valuable. We are being told that we should value them, that they will solve our issues, but this is only a temporary fix.

Companies are increasingly engineering their products and services to fit in with social media’s aesthetic gaze. We are becoming extensions of these products, as we too engineer our image in order to ‘sell’ our identities online. Our decisions are increasingly image-based as we become hyper-aware of our own aesthetic, but adhering to these standards creates only surface-based fulfilment.

We need to, as Hari says, use social media with a pinch of salt. This is difficult as it becomes ever more all-encompassing in our lives. But, generating an awareness of its drawbacks is a part of this self-moderation.

Grappling with social media

I guess the point of me writing this article is simply to continue the process of grappling with social media, of evaluating and analysing its effects. We have got to a point where we cannot live without social media, so we must learn to live with it. And I believe that the only way to do this is to be investigative, to be conscious, and to be cautious of its effects on us. It is such a powerful, constantly-moving system that if we don't constantly grapple with it, we will fall victim to it, it will overwhelm us. This is not easy, no, but it may be necessary for our psychological survival in a tumultuous and greedy world. We need to learn to use social media as a tool, because otherwise it will use us.

Edit: Since writing this post I found another really interesting TED Talk about the effects of our increased screen time on happiness. Link here: https://www.ted.com/talks/adam_alter_why_our_screens_make_us_less_happy