Does social media stop you from connecting with people?
Social media helps you to avoid monotonous work, at least temporarily. I wrote a post for the Good Practice Exchange at the Wales Audit Office last week about how I was changing the way that I work to be more efficient. I’ve been using social media as a way to plug any free time that I have in my life, from waiting for friends at a pub to waiting for my food to be ready at home. My brother voiced his fear to me a while back that his phone was actually distracting him from making better use of his time with his children. This struck me as being a bit over the top at the time, but when I thought about it, I realised that I was being distracted in the same way.
Different platforms are competing against each other for our attention. The more use we make of these channels, the more data they harvest. There’s a fascinating interview on The Atlantic with Tristan Harris (who set up Time Well Spent) that shows what we’re up against:
While some blame our collective tech addiction on personal failings, like weak willpower, Harris points a finger at the software itself. That itch to glance at our phone is a natural reaction to apps and websites engineered to get us scrolling as frequently as possible…… we’ve lost control of our relationship with technology because technology has become better at controlling us.
Tristan compares the gratification that we get from technology to the thrill that we get from gambling. It’s worth checking out this Guardian Long Read and podcast on How Technology Gets Us Hooked for a bit more information on the context in which we’re living our online lives.
So I’ve been applying some of what I’ve learnt about being productive to my personal life. I’ve been pondering the role of email in my work, and in the same way I’ve been thinking about whether the time I spend on social media is actually making my personal life any better.
What have I done?
In my work post, I wrote that nobody emails in an emergency. The same rules can generally be applied to social media. Whilst Twitter works best as a real time forum for information exchange, and WhatsApp has replaced my use of text messages, very few mobile notifications require my immediate attention. So I’ve turned off sound and vibration for all updates barring phone calls.
I’ve also begun to change my own personal behaviour. Leaving my phone out of reach means that I have to actively choose to use my phone instead of being prompted to do so. It’s given me time to challenge my initial reactions.
I sometimes haven’t made it easy for myself. I used to use my phone as an alarm clock, which made it difficult to avoid the notifications that had appeared overnight. Buying a separate alarm clock has saved me about half an hour of procrastination in bed every morning!
Why not just ditch the tech?
For nearly a year now I’ve been in a long distance relationship, and these platforms have enabled me to interact with Kelly on a day to day basis that simply wouldn’t have been possible without them. Kelly’s written a fantastic post about our digital romance, and I think she’s bang on when she says that there’s little benefit in a scorched earth approach to digital. I’ve written a lot in this post about digital distractions, but they’re also helping me to make better use of my time. My journeys to Kelly are now filled with fascinating podcasts that I wouldn’t have had a chance to listen to without my phone. But more importantly than that, it’s helped me to better connect with the love of my life when we’re living apart for much of the week.
By adapting the way that I’m using my phone, I’m making more of my time with the people that I care about. In reality, all I’m doing is re-aligning social media and online platforms to the purpose to which they were originally designed — to help me better connect with people.
