Ding. The weekly notification popped up on my phone. “Your social media usage this week was more than last week.”
To which my default response would have typically been along the lines of “would you ever feck off with yourself” until the other day when I noticed that my usage had spiralled by a whopping 60%!
What the actual … ?
“How can that be?” I moaned. Until I remembered a ‘throuple’ of marathon WhatsApp sessions the week before.
“Oops. Not good.”
One thing I have noticed, is that when I am down in West Cork, to which I am a frequent flyer (well, trainer and busser), my social media usage plummets. Why? Probably because I spend so much of my time there immersed in nature. Rain, hail or shine, I’m out there, hiking up cliffs, toiling up vertiginous pathways (Tanyard Hill anyone?), making notes about seasonal plant growth (plans for a book), strolling on the beach and generally admiring the Galley Head lighthouse from every possible angle.
And, when not communing with Ma Nature, I can usually be found communing with the multi-coloured members of my family – every shade of personality from coimhthíoch to chiúin to craic (bordering on bonkers).
So, as being present in the moment in West Cork is not an everyday option, I decided to make several changes to my online behaviours in a bid to address the sixty per cent increase in my social media usage, the first being switching my phone to Flight Mode when out walking. Yes, this comes at a price – no access to BBC R3 or non-downloaded music on Spotify. Conversely though, this small change has achieved the added bonus of my actually being able to spend some time outside of my own head, quietening my mind (a bit) and enjoying the sights and sounds through which I pass, be they in the nearby park, by the river or simply on the pathways of my local area.
Next move? To silence the endless ping-a-ling of incoming messages, of which a large portion typically contain stupid cat videos along with a litany of those ironically named ‘funnies’. The type of trite juvenile humour we used to find uproariously funny as goofy school-kids. Ahem, yes you, guilty as charged; you know who you are.
Needing to emerge from the time devouring black hole that social media has a habit of becoming when we allow ourselves to fall victim to its algorithmic charms, I decided to act on the advice of a younger, much more social media savvy mate.
Opting out of the ‘Last Seen Online’ setting on WhatsApp is one of the best things I could have done. This deliberate removal of the “Open for Business” sign has resulted in a serious dip in traffic to my feed. Before, my contacts could see when I was online, and this typically resulted in rushed “while you’re there” texts which more often than not descended into a frenzy of ““did you hear”, “did you know”, “did I tell you” messaging mania” involving multiple ????s and !!!!s as well as a wide variety of 🤣🤪😉 and 🙏🏻. To complement that move, I’ve also silenced notifications to my phone.
Five days in and the silence is very golden.
Even better, I’ve noticed that I’ve stopped looking at my home screen every other ten minutes to check for incoming messages, mail or whatever. I’ve learnt to put the phone down and ignore it for long periods of time.
As for the platform fka Twitter, I’ve unticked all notifications bar the bare essentials. I’ve started ignoring all notifications on Insta bar those which are DMs from people I know and unsubscribed my gmail account from a string of ‘sales mail’ that’s been blocking up my inbox like lard in an artery.
While all of the above changes have worked a treat, I can say without any hesitation that the best move I ever made in terms of changing how I interact with social media was to delete my Facebook account, which I did around this time last year.
Too noisy, too cluttered with rubbish ads, to showy-offy, too many photos of friends of friends of friends in whom I had zero interest – as the Americans say, enough already.
For some reason, I always found FB rather competitive, almost as if all these people who were friends-not-friends, most of whom had never even met each other, were in a constant battle with one another to see who could garner the most likes, live their ‘best lives’ whilst deploying an endless barrage of ‘surgically enhanced’ photos of their seemingly non-stop social butterfly lifestyles.
Fun fact: some ten years or so ago, I attended a blogger conference during which one of the guest speakers, supposedly a hugely popular Insta Influencer, stepped up on stage and opened with the line – “It’s all about the likes, folks. All about getting the likes”. Which is why Insta and its sister platform FB are such very toxic environments for impressionable tweens, teens and young adults. They must get the likes, have an ever-growing list of friends, post over-the-top super filtered, mega photo-shopped pics and pout til they drop, or until they develop RSI leaving their mouths like a frozen trout in perpetuity.
Without doubt, social media is an addictive, mind bending, often life-altering quagmire, where reality becomes muddied by mis and disinformation. The average Joe spends 150 minutes a day on social media – two and a half hours during which attitudes and views can be changed, friendships can be made and broken, and intelligent, respectable people can be eviscerated by armies of extremist looney tunes for stating a fact-based opinion.
While by its omnipresence in the modern world social media is an inescapable necessity, we can make small changes to how and when we use these tools and platforms to ensure that we optimise the benefits and minimise the negative impacts including stress, paranoia and mistruths.
To leverage modern parlance, the key is to ‘own’ your usage; to control what you actually view as opposed to letting the algorithms make the decisions for you. We need to remember that devices are technological tools designed to help make our everyday life easier. They are not comfort blankets, neither are social media platforms our new BFFs.
At the end of the day, the real tops the virtual. In the words of Shakespeare, “seeming is not reality”. Often what we see, read or hear on social media platforms is a distorted or misrepresented version of the truth. Now, with the advancement of AI, that distorted reality is about to become a whole lot shadier.
To stop social media apps from manipulating us, we need to take back control of our time, our tech and our ability to live in the real world. There’s a time for stupid cat videos. There’s a time for feverish exchanges of the latest goss on WhatsApp. But that time should be minimal. Instead, our time should be focussed on meeting with, and talking to our real friends, colleagues and acquaintances. On being in nature and enjoying its benefits. On being comfortable with our own company, without the need for constant social media ‘reinforcement’.
Conversation flows more freely when we are looking someone in the eye, can see their facial expressions, can read their body language.
Life is more enjoyable when people can chat, smile and laugh together, rather than relying on emojis to convey how their company makes them feel.
What can top the dopamine hit of a good side splitting laugh or the warmth of a tight hug?
So, while I won’t be deleting the few social media apps I still use any time soon, I have seriously curtailed how and when I use them. Instead, I have followed my instincts to scroll less, stroll more. I have upped my social ante, going out more, gigging, returning to the book club, organising coffee dates and walks and generally living life the good old fashioned way, because in the words of that ever eloquent purveyor of flannel, Mark Renton, I’ve decided to #chooselife
dervswerve 