Can We Actually Quit Social Media?
We have studied the pros and cons of what social media does for you, but what happens when you quit? Is it even possible in a day and age where most people grow up on social media and use it as an integral part of everyday life. My worry is that we haven’t even come to a point where we are seeing people quit social. Like really quit. Not just delete the app on their phone. That would be like quitting smoking, but still taking a drag after you go to a bar which happens to be every other night. It is totally cheating.
Is it sad that for all of history besides the last decade and a half we have not had social media, and now we study the time without it. Social media is like electricity. We just assume before it people bumped into walls all the time.
There are a few things that fall short when you leave social media. You are kinda out of the loop if you know what I mean… All the conversations your friends are having and the inside jokes on T.V are about something that you have no idea exists. Its called a Facebook Feed for a reason. It is feeding you in every direction what you consume and process and appropriate in everyday life. This concern has manifested itself into a real epidemic among millennials called FOMO. Most people reading this are millennials, so yea you, you know what I am talking about, The Fear of Missing Out.
Pause.
My phone buzzed.
It might be a Facebook invite to the concert tonight that I wanted to go to, but didn’t know if anyone was actually going…(unlocking phone).
Crap it’s just a Farmville invite.
“Calling Dr. McLaughlin we have a case of FOMO on our hands!”
True story- according to Dr. McLaughlin a Psychiatrist who is an assistant professor at Texas A&M, at least three to 13 percent of the population are diagnosed with this growing social anxiety. That’s right, diagnosed. Social media use has been studied and linked to conditions such as ADHD since the days of IMing. FOMO is considered a new social anxiety disorder of the digital age. “A fear of being judged by others or embarrassing oneself in social interactions,” McLaughlin says. A person with this psychiatric condition will be prescribed medication if they have a history of anxiety. FOMO on social media specifically has been described by McLaughlin as “fueling a lack of self-confidence and social avoidance.”
The reasons behind FOMO come from some legitimate road blocks today if you are not using social media. Almost all media is connected to the content that is originally being discovered and shared through social media platforms. Besides missing out on your friends latest Instagrammed lunch, people are missing out on their friends wedding photos, and the latest happenings in daily news. Heck, we could have declared war on Russia and that would probably slip by me if I was not on social media. Okay maybe not war on Russia, but the point is without social media you have to go out of your way to consume news.
While technology changes, the world changes with it. In many fields people’s livelihoods are dependent on not just other people using social media, but using social media as a tool and resource. Efficiency is too often key. If you are on social media it is quicker and easier to not only see social news, but real life news content. In many industries if we weren’t able to use social to stay on top of the world’s news beat, we would simply be behind at work. The time it takes to access every website or god forbid a hard copy of a news is plain inefficiency. Doing your research and finding market opinion is a huge factor in any field and how could you appropriately and accurately do that without the use of social media tracking. This is how the world moves and communicates these day. #sorrynotsorry
Time Magazine quotes a study “from recruitment-technology firm Jobvite, a whopping 92 percent of recruiters use social media today. Although LinkedIn is the most popular destination, two-thirds of respondents say they now use Facebook and more than half say they use Twitter.” If you fall in the category of the slim 10 percent of young adults who do not use Facebook Forbes confirms that this is a red flag.
I’ve heard both job seekers and employers wonder aloud about what it means if a job candidate doesn’t have a Facebook account. Does it mean they deactivated it because it was full of red flags? Are they hiding something? … It does seem that increasingly, it’s expected that everyone is on Facebook in some capacity, and that a negative assumption is starting to arise about those who reject the Big Blue Giant’s siren call.
Clearly with this generation it is extremely difficult to get a job without being well connected in every sense of the phrase. 79 percent of respondents of the Jobvites Social Networking Study have made hires through social networks and use other social networking platforms to help differentiate and weed out candidates. As someone who has hired people and have been up for hire I couldn’t imagine a world without social media to find jobs and do reference checks.
Last January 2015 the average amount of time spent on social media a day is 1.72 hours, but in the same poll teens showed to spend 9 hours a day on social media. The fear is that over the coming years more hours will be spent on line due to the active and necessary tools. Can we actually quit? A Cornell survey done by Stacey Shackford shows this graph about people attempting to flee social media.
The graph still shows about half of people who have deleted or deactivated their Facebook has returned Facebook. Still this is just Facebook. The final theme quoted in a follow up Cornell Study about the 99 Days of Freedom event that challenges people to quit Facebook for, well 99 days… you get it, says the group found was that Facebook users are less likely to log back in if they have other social media outlets to visit. Aha! So quitting social media completely is still pretty unheard of.
The best practices to balance social media effectively is to implement a content calendar and strategy, so that your time on social media has a purpose and a goal. Prioritize your reasons for being on social media, and overall be aware of the time you spend on their. Everything in life is supposed to be used in moderation and is harmful at large doses.
