Claire COHEN
It was the simulated smiles that did it for me. Sinister doesn’t cover it. I speak of the UK’S first robot restaurant, which has just opened in Milton Keynes and become a hit with locals thanks to its cheerful (read, creepy) droid waiters.
Inevitably, whenever anything like this comes along, talk turns to the “rise of the machines”. One minute, you’re being handed a quattro formaggio by a friendly automaton and the next you’re enslaved.
I’m sure all the robots at Robotazia are delightful (keep them on side and I’ll be queen of the human worker bees). But the truth is that we’re already slaves to the machines: our phones and the social media apps contained on them.
Well – allow me a moment of smugness, here – I have set myself free. If not from the tyranny of my phone entirely (I’m only human), then at least from Instagram, which I have just marked a whole year without.
It began when I admitted to a friend that looking at glossy pictures of other people’s lives was getting me down. I mainly followed those whose work I admired, willingly putting my self-esteem in the firing line. When all around you seem to be achieving more, it’s tough not to draw comparisons – even if you know the filters also mask failures.
My pal agreed, and so we made a pact: delete Instagram from our phones and go cold turkey. Except no one had told my thumb. For the first few days, it involuntarily twitched whenever I looked at the screen – searching for the app button. I missed it. I was irritable – possibly not helped by my friend downloading an app that awarded her gold stars for every hour she successfully avoided social media.
Reader, she lasted a week. I decided to see how long I could resist. And – a funny thing – as the days passed, I started to feel less addicted to Instagram itself and more addicted to the feeling of not being on it. With every month, I mentioned the milestone not-so-casually to anyone in earshot. Probably, I have been unbearable. But it felt 50 times better than getting 50 likes.
I also felt as though I’d clawed back some privacy. “I never know what you’re doing anymore”, an acquaintance told me. What a relief not to be tracked and traced around the internet; for strangers to know whether I was spending the weekend in London or Leith.
It’s why I want to preach my new religion to Adele. The singer has had a rough time on Instagram lately. This week, she was accused of cultural appropriation after being pictured in a Jamaican flag-print bikini with her hair in Bantu knots, a style traditionally worn by black women. And for months, she has been sent foul, jealous abuse for having the temerity to lose weight.
What’s extraordinary is that, until now, Adele was barely on social media. For years, she managed to party with her celebrity mates, raise her young son and get divorced, all under the radar. Why she would choose to start sharing her private life now is beyond me.
Most of my own harassment occurs on Twitter, which I need for work. And even though it doesn’t make international headlines every time I have a controversial opinion, being called “a ruptured fire hose of period blood” by strangers does stick in the craw somewhat.
If Instagram is the crucible of comparison, Twitter is a snake pit of polarisation and poisonous rows. Little wonder that new BBC director-general Tim Davie has already cracked down on staff using the platform, telling them: “If you want to be an opinionated columnist or a partisan campaigner on social media then that is a valid choice, but you should not be working at the BBC.”
Ouch. That won’t be easy for many journalists, who consider Twitter a vital part of their jobs, not to mention a way to have a voice outside the confines of the corporation’s impartiality rules. I’m sure they won’t stop scrolling entirely but I wonder whether they might actually find the new boundaries a relief in the social media Wild West. Given Twitter is where many a career (not to mention sanity) has gone to die, would a break from the tyranny of having to offer an opinion on everything be so bad?
Perhaps The Social Dilemma, a new Netflix documentary out next week, will help toughen their resolve. It interviews the tech experts who created our social platforms and sees them essentially trash their own inventions, admitting they were “naive” about the impact.
I was certainly naive when it came to Instagram. Since being offline, I feel less pressure to be perfect and spend less time on my phone. Naturally, I’ve smugly set it to tell me precisely how much less – down by two hours last week. Gold stars all round.
We all know how damaging social media can be. We’ve read study after study that has found it impacts our mental health and makes us lonelier. Whether your vice is Instagram, Facebook, Twitter or Tiktok, the fact is that your brain is slowly but surely being rewired. Who’s the robot now?