Blurred lines of social media
LONDON: In my daily routine, the first and last things I do, in bed, are to scroll through Facebook and Instagram looking both at the news and what all my friends are up to.
It then permeates through the rest of my day too: I check Twitter on my commute and read any notifications that light up my phone throughout the day.
Social media has become second nature to us millennials but is the fact that we are never truly switched off doing us harm?
The first hurdle is popularity. For example, the worry when you share a carefully filtered photo on Instagram and wait for the likes to – hopefully – rack up leading your brain to somehow equate your popularity and value IRL with how many people enjoyed that photo of your eggs benedict.
Similarly, how many followers you have on Twitter does not mean you have that many actual friends. Yet for many on social media the lines can be blurry as followers can be seen as a validation for how funny, witty or interesting you are.
If you have lots of followers, the fear of making a blunder and causing outrage is also omnipresent.
Social media makes us think we are just having conversations with friends but the amount of time we spend oogling wealthy, beautiful and seemingly perfect strangers on Instagram and comparing our lives and appearances with theirs only fuels existing insecurities. As does, that Snapchat story of all your friends at the party you couldn’t attend, which was probably rubbish apart from that moment they all collectively posed for a selfie.
The rationale that nobody’s life is perfect and that what they share on social media is carefully curated and edited often goes out the window during these times.
The never-ending stream of tweets, status updates, pictures and news can feel overwhelming and as if you are constantly missing something if you do not read all of it. So is it healthy to take the odd break every now and again?
A 2012 study by Anxiety UK found that 45% of people who are not able to access their social networks or e-mail felt worried or uncomfortable as a result. Additionally, 60% of those studied said they felt the need to completely switch off their phones and computers to have a proper break.
Ben Jacobs, a DJ who has over 5 000 Twitter followers, took an indefinite hiatus from Twitter in January 2016, and, so far, has not looked back.
“One of the reasons I quit was because I found myself devoting an unhealthy proportion of my spare time on Twitter,” he told The Independent. “I was one of those people who would wake up in a cold sweat at 3am to see if I had received any responses to my latest pithy proclamation.
“Twitter did indeed make me feel anxious from time to time as it slowly dawned on me I was concerning myself with the feelings of the thousands of strangers I followed, while they didn’t necessarily know who I was.
“Since my Twitter hiatus, I have had a clearer head with plenty of time to devote to other things such as waking up in a cold sweat at 3am and reading a book instead,” the 42-year-old said.
Jacobs is contemplating whether to return to the site and might do when he has another musical announcement, “these things take time”.