Sick of Social
Turns out misery only loves so much company
ARE you sick of social media? It’s not just you.
Once upon a time, social media had so much promise. Reconnect with your best friend from Kindergarten! Crowdsource which refrigerator to buy! Find like-minded people with your esoteric hobbies! And for those of us who work from home it gave us a space to socialize with other humans.
But soon it turned into something else. Now you’re in touch with everyone you’ve ever met, even if it was just in passing. “I would’ve been so much nicer to everyone in my life if I knew eventually they were all coming back,” comedian Tom Papa once quipped.
And it’s not as helpful as it once seemed. The group you joined to discuss backgammon strategies devolves into debates on gun control every few days. Turns out your friends don’t know anything about refrigerators. And you aren’t so much hanging out with your friends anymore as fending off acquaintances who are privy to all of your interactions.
Social-media companies know they’re in trouble. A few days ago Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey acknowledged the toxicity of his platform. He tweeted his commitment “to help increase the collective health, openness and civility of public conversation.”
In January, Mark Zuckerberg made a similar announcement. In a Facebook post he noted that his goal was “making sure the time we all spend on Facebook is time well spent” and for us to have “meaningful social interactions.” A week before that he had posted his yearly New Year’s resolution. This year he resolved to “fix” Facebook.
The acknowledgement that these sites need fixing is a step in the right direction but it may be too little, too late.
A survey published by Origin last week found that half of young people age 18-24 have had enough of social media, with 34 percent saying they’ve deleted all their accounts.
Part of the problem is that there’s no real solution to the bad parts of social media. Facebook’s decision to push less commercial, and more friend-based, interactions seemed like a good idea. To encourage more “real” conversation, posts with a lot of comments get pushed to the top of feeds.
Of course, posts with the largest amount of comments tend to be people arguing and so corporate posts have been replaced with overwhelmingly negative posts.
Similarly, nothing gets more retweets on Twitter than a solid burn. For all the complaints about bots and anonymous accounts on Twitter they’re almost beside the point. Plenty of blue-tick verified users go for each other’s jugular daily.
Being online has become less fun, yet so many of us continue to addictively check in to Facebook and Twitter out of sheer habit — which helps explain, perhaps, why it gets progressively less fun.
We’re so into it that it’s messing with our sleep. A 2016 study out of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine found that “30 percent of the participants [who used social media at least one hour per day] had high levels of sleep disturbance.”
A Pew Survey released last week found that 51 percent of Americans check their Facebook accounts multiple times per day. At least one hour of social media use isn’t hard to achieve if you’re refreshing it throughout the day.
There’s a lot good about social media, but if you find yourself constantly in scrolling mode and not feeling good about it, it might be time to step away for a little while. It shouldn’t feel like a chore to check in with your social circle online, and when it stops being fun we should stop doing it.
Last October I wrote in these pages that it’s not social media making us miserable, we’ve become more miserable off-line too. I still believe that Facebook or Twitter aren’t the cause of our unhappiness, but they exacerbate it. I wrote, “Social media, and Facebook in particular, don’t invent things for you to get mad about, they only amplify what is already pissing you off.”
I have loved social media since the beginning. Before Facebook and Twitter I was on My Space and Friendster. The idea of hanging out with my friends online has always appealed to me. But I’m recognizing that I don’t enjoy it the way I used to and I’m tired of the negativity and argumentativeness of the platforms.
It’s time for me to make a change. It might be time for you to do the same.