If A Tree Falls In The Woods And Nobody Is There To Capture It On Social Media…
…Does It Still Make A Sound?
1st July 2015
It’s been 9 hours and for 7 of them I was sleeping but I’m already having withdrawal symptoms.
Over the last couple of years, social media has become a bigger and bigger part of my life and more recently, almost taken it over. An 18 month stint as GM of a social media agency helped me justify it for a while but when I left and tried to strip back my usage, I didn’t/couldn’t.
The weekend just gone, again highlighted my dependence on this new drug (Facebook being my main drug of choice), leading up to an epiphany last night that I was going to join the new craze of “Dry July”, substituting my abstention of alcohol for a clean break from Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat, WhatsApp, Vine, Messenger, Foursquare, Skype, Viber, Tango, Voxer, FaceTime, Yelp, BitStrips (more like ShitStrips), and even the social sharing of musical choices with Shazam and Spotify. Name your poison!
Upon said epiphany, what was my first move? What was my tribal instinct to action this enlightened plan for a better life? Of course! I “posted it” on Facebook to tell my “Friends”. Even now, in my darkest hour of cold turkey (the first morning is always the worst), what am I doing? Blogging. With the question at the forefront of my mind, What am I going to do with this blog if I have nowhere to “post it”? Such a question, coupled with being slightly delirious from the cold turkey, has yielded the question in the title of this, erm, *cough-blog-cough*, a parody of George Berkeley’s philosophical outlook of trees falling in a deserted forest — “If A Tree Falls In The Woods And Nobody Is There To Capture It On Social Media….. Does It Still Make A Sound?”
A more succinct question and one that scratches a little deeper may be, “Are we capable of living in the moment and experiencing life for ourselves without external stimulation?” With the sub-question asking “Is it unhealthy to need such constant external stimulation?”
The answer to the first question is, obviously some people can. In fact, a large proportion of society know how to live in the moment. To them, social media is but an extension to their lives. It’s something that adds to their enjoyment of life and acts as a tool to help them stay in contact with their friends and family. This of course is the “official party line” of all social media users. To those that have the balance, I salute you. To everybody else who trots out the official party line, (including myself):
“I use it to stay in touch with my friends and family whom I don’t speak to regularly”
Yeah, yeah, and we read Playboy for the articles and “post” pictures of our food to aid our blooming food critic careers. Whatever!
The healthy/unhealthy debate could and probably will rage on for years but comes down to individual control. For me, it’s unhealthy. That’s my personality. I’m an all-or-nothing guy who can’t dip his toe in, but has to dive in head first and be completely consumed by it. I’ve never taken drugs because even in my rebellious teen years, I was lucky enough to have enough self awareness to know this about my personality. In the context of social media or what the clinical term should actually be for social media, “external stimulation”, I’m addicted. I need external stimulation constantly. This addiction is very similar to that of alcohol and raises the same inward question you ask yourself, Am I addicted because I went too far with it, or did I go too far with it because I’m an addict? Again, the answer will differ between ‘subjects’(ha!) but for me, my personality dictates that whatever I use as a stimulant, will probably become a large part of my life.
Now granted, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg et al have not helped matters. It’’s all too easy to find that external stimulation in the palm of your hand now. *As an aside, those lucky bastards didn’t identify this need in humanity, they stumbled upon it! However, they became successful because this basic human need has grown and grown and giving us it in such a basic form has allowed us all to adopt it and subsequently use it as a way of life.
So is what Jim Collins calls ‘the undisciplined pursuit of more’ being enabled by the three trends that are driving society these days — Smart phones, social media and our egos?
Absolutely.
How is it affecting society other than the obvious effects of having our noses deep in our iPhones all day long?
Literally bumping into each other in the street? The lost art of saying “good morning” to strangers or shop assistants? Dinner conversations being interrupted by camera flashes as each course comes out?
Notwithstanding the digital footprint and unmanned Facebook accounts that will be floating around the internet for years after these 3/4/5 generations are gone.
For me, it’s allowing me to lift my head in the street. To take part in an exchange of morning greetings with the poor bastard that tries to converse with me as he makes my coffee each morning. It’s challenging me to put my thoughts down in more than a 140 character ”tweets” or a mind-numbing couple of sentences in a “status”. Most of all however, it’s forcing me to live in the moment and appreciate life for myself, something I’ve never been good at even before the social revolution came around. Consider this if you will, how often do you experience something and your first thought is, I need to capture this to share with _____? Of course, there’s nothing wrong with wanting to share experiences with people you love, but have you appreciated it yourself first?
Give it a try. Catch a sunset and by all means capture it on your iPhone. But try NOT posting it on your Instagram account (and of course, linking it to your Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn accounts). Don’t post it anywhere. In fact, don’t show it to anyone else. When you go home, sit down and appreciate it again by yourself and then delete it. Each moment of your life is unlike any other. To live each one to the fullest, you need to learn not only to be in the moment, fully, but to then step out of it. This is detachment and is the key to being happy in your own life. Having the objectivity to say “I have experienced this and enjoyed it and now I can move on” allows you to feel the full range of emotions that come with each experience and allows you to understand both yourself and your emotions in those experiences.
For me, this is what is lost with social media. I see a sunset, my main course comes out excellently presented, a duck farts as it waddles across my path. The very first thought, before experiencing any joy for myself is, “I need to capture this and share with my “Friends”. I know I’m not the only one living like this because every day you see people whipping their phones out to capture a moment. You see it on your own “timeline”, videos of special moments in everyday life. An old lady falls in the street, the natural human reaction used to be “I’ll go help her up and check she’s ok”. Not any more. 9 out of 10 people are more likely to have their phone out taking pictures and within seconds, it’s up on Facebook, Twitter etc.
If I’m honest with myself, I’m one of those people. Or at least I was and I may be again but for the next 31 days, it’s Dry July and I’ll be embracing the life away from my iPhone. Outside of work, I’m going to read The Power Of Now by Eckhart Tolle instead of looking at my phone all night. I’m hoping that what it lacks in food pictures and funny videos, it makes up for in enlightenment.
“Realize deeply that the present moment is all you have. Make the NOW the primary focus of your life.” — Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now
*Any words or phrases in itallics and/or in inverted commas, either came about or have evolved from the social revolution. Just a post script to highlight the effect social media has on even our general vocabulary. Ridiculous words like “Blog” and “Shazam” are uttered without a second thought these days. Some, like “blogging” and “google” have even made it into the dictionary as an adjective. The world’s gone mad!
