It’s Complicated: My Relationship With Social Media, Or An Odyssey In Deleting An App
Even before the story broke about Cambridge Analytica’s harvesting of Facebook users’ data, I have been trying to manage my relationship with social media. I have had Facebook for nearly nine years, Twitter for four, Snapchat and Instagram for less. I had a Tumblr account briefly, but deleted it last year in an effort to reduce the amount of accounts I have passwords for and do not use. I was never into Vine, and was only barely aware of it before it vanished forever into the digital void.
Plenty has already been written about how we are addicted to our phones, whether “addiction” is the technically correct term, how we no longer have time to be bored, and, of course, the influence of Facebook and other social media on our democracy. Instead, I would like to take a moment to think about the impact social media apps have on my daily life.
About two weeks ago I experimented by deleting the main Facebook app, though keeping its Messenger companion. It scares me how this felt like quite a radical step when really this was probably the most conservative measure I could have taken. I could just as easily delete both Facebook apps off my phone, now including messenger. I could delete all Facebook-owned apps off my phone, which would then include WhatsApp and Instagram. Or I could delete my Facebook account entirely, a step I do not anticipate taking at any point soon since there are still far too many people for whom Facebook is my primary contact method for them. I have, however, in addition to my experiment, un-liked a variety of pages in an attempt to prune my future digital footprint. So really, deleting the app is not a terribly radical step, but rather removing a small temptation from my immediate reach.
This is not to say I spent no time on the app. On the contrary, the Facebook iOS app has been the prime culprit of my attention theft for years now. In college I checked Facebook first or second in the morning, its position alternating with the bane of humanity that is email, and I would check it reliably whenever I felt bored or otherwise did not know what to do with myself during idle minutes. In college, this served more of a purpose since nearly every on-campus event and performance would be publicized through Facebook, so it helped for me to be able to check notifications quickly. I also found news articles and thought-provoking essays, particularly in The Atlantic, which I have since downloaded the separate app for (in addition to reading my family’s print subscription). Looking through my news feed now makes me question why I am even on the news feed in the first place. Do I need to like this status, do I need to follow that page or save this article?
So sick of wasting time, I opened my phone and deleted the app without a second thought. The transition was weird, especially since I started to notice how often I would instinctively reach for my phone to open Facebook. I found myself reading some of my primary sources of news (The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Atlantic to name a few) on their own apps, in addition to several other newspapers and magazines. I did find myself on Twitter more, mostly reading rather than tweeting though.
I have a much less complicated relationship with Twitter — as someone who primarily follows news agencies, reading Twitter feels like a slow burning dumpster fire that is easier to step away from because I do not rely on it for contacting my friends in the way I do Facebook. I adamantly refused to get Twitter until a professor my freshman year told my class to follow him since he posted articles there each morning. I sometimes wonder if Shakespeare would still stand by his “Brevity is the soul of wit” line if he were on Twitter.
I re-downloaded Facebook again about a week ago. I made it more than a week, which seemed to be long enough to make me more cognizant about how I use the mobile app. I moved it to a different position on the same back page of a folder on my phone where I keep all my social media, and it’s been a different experience having it back. I try to be more aware of when I use it because I have nothing better to do, and motivate myself to do something else instead, like read a book or see if I am actually just procrastinating on something I really ought to be doing.
Not having Facebook’s app on my phone was simultaneously relaxing and more stressful. I would often not check my notifications until the end of the day when I opened my laptop, most of which were generally unimportant. The one downside I noticed was that I was less in tune with event invitations that were distributed via Facebook, but again, if I really needed something, I could open up Safari or Chrome and log on through the mobile browser instead. It really did not cause any problems, and I kind of enjoyed not thinking about it. All in all, I might start deleting the app more often, and maybe Twitter too.
