The TOA Guide To Using Social Media Without Losing Your Sanity
Life but with a better filter. Life but you can mute that guy who’s only two beers into the party and is already making #MeToo jokes. Life but all killer no filler — engagements, college acceptance letters, first babies, beach holidays in far-off paradises, kittens. Social media can sometimes feel like a more user-friendly version of the real thing. So if you’re active on apps like Facebook or Instagram, it’s likely that you might go through phases of overdoing it. Which is something which seems all the more worrying in the age of Christopher Wylie and the knowledge that you might not just be losing your concentration, but your privacy along with it.
Spending too much time on social doesn’t sound familiar? Bear in mind that you wouldn’t necessarily notice if you were overusing the medium. According to a 2017 study by Kent University, when 44 participants were shown online images and images in the context of Facebook, people tended to underestimate the time they spent looking at Facebook-related images more than any other images. According to the study’s lead author, Lazaros Gonidis, this shows that “this frequent use of Facebook distorts our time perception” which “could mean that people may involuntarily stay on Facebook more than they originally planned and this could have implications on their productivity, personal relations, resting/sleeping time, etc.”
Even just a couple of hours a day adds up. According to a 2017 study from influencer marketing agency Mediakix, the average person will spend more than five years on social media over the course of their lifetime. Which may be the most crushingly depressing statistic you’ll ever hear. Forget the suspicions about a deterioration in concentration, a link between teen depression and time spent on social media, etc., etc. — half a decade of liking your friends’ pictures of their new dog? Jesus.
Of course, social media is like basically anything fun (limoncello, the music of Frank Zappa, home makeover shows) — great in moderation and a recipe for shredding your brain in excess. So how do you keep your social media use something that makes your life happier, not harder? TOA looked to three experts for some answers.
Think Before You Like: Social Media’s Effect on the Brain and the Tools You Need to Navigate Your Newsfeed author Guy P. Harrison believes that it’s worth simply taking stock of the business context behind the tech giants. Harrison says “Everyone should know that Facebook, Twitter and all the others have armies of very smart and well-paid engineers working hard to figure out new ways to keep people hooked on their sites and apps. Simply being aware of this can help us to keep our use under control and be sensible about what we share.”
He continues, “…these social media platforms are not neutral, pure, or altruistic. I’m not suggesting that they are evil or anything like that, but they exist primarily to make money for the owners and shareholders, not to make your life happier. The priority is always profit. Never forget that they make money, lots of it, by keeping users coming back to share words, photos, and feelings.”
But it isn’t just about the fact that these programmes are built to be addictive. If you can’t stop envy-scrolling through your colleague’s overly well-documented gap year in South America, don’t feel bad — you’re not the only one. Professor of information systems at the University of Oulu, Finland and Tech Open Air 2016 speaker Harri Oinas-Kukkonen observes “Many of the applications are built around social comparison, [the idea] that you observe and compare yourself with others.” He recommends staying conscious of the fact that this is a vital function of social media channels like Facebook and Instagram and that comparison is a natural part of most social media use.
Social media researcher at the University of Helsinki and Tech Open Air 2016 speaker Suvi Uski argues that we need to change the way we talk about the topic. She says “We talk a lot about social media fasting, giving up social media for two weeks. I don’t believe that’s the ideal answer to giving up addictive behaviour.” Realistically, she believes that in the future we’ll continue to need social media, whether for work or connecting with friends far away. As such, “what we need is the skills to manage when we use it and what kind of emotions and mental states it brings to us.” In other words, stop adopting a feast-or-famine mentality and look at a healthier way to integrate it into your life over the long-term.
But what would such a strategy for healthy social media use look like? Arguably one of the trickiest aspects of this technology is that we can access instant fun on the same machines we often use for work. Uski notes that even interrupting yourself during working can be habit-forming: “If we learn to behave that way it affects our decision making, our thinking, our general cognitive skills, which means we become a little bit stupider. We don’t have the patience to learn how to think. So you might know you have an exam tomorrow and you have to read properly but you keep interrupting yourself every five minutes, because you’re like oh, this sentence is too difficult, so you take your phone out and check social media instead. We become like children, without the capacity to control our own behaviour.”
As such, when it comes to mastering using social media healthily, one of the biggest challenges is simply figuring out the work/digital balance. Oinas-Kukkonen observes that constant social media interruption leads to an erosion of our priorities: “you end up doing only small, easy things in your work and personal life rather than taking [on] bigger tasks.” He argues this snowballs into frequent social media users believing that they’re accomplishing a lot when doing a lot of small tasks which leads to them actively avoiding taking on bigger tasks and misleading themselves about productivity. In short, it affects users ability to carry out meaningful, demanding work. But solving this isn’t rocket science. He suggests sitting down at the beginning of the working day or week and making a list of the tasks you need to carry out — that way you’ll be more conscious about your priorities and won’t just focus on quick, easy tasks, but will take stock of the more challenging work you need to accomplish, too.
Harrison suggests another solution for ensuring concentration when you’re tackling challenging tasks. “Understand that the mere presence of your phone is a distraction that negatively impacts your mental performance on important tasks. I cite studies in my book about this. When I am doing serious brain work, I leave my phone in my car, place it in another room, or at least zip it up out-of-sight in my computer bag.”
But even if you’re on top of your work, it’s still worth evaluating how you use social media in your free time. Uski suggests taking stock of whether or not you’re using social media excessively by making deals with yourself. “You have to go to the toilet and think ok, I’m not taking my phone with me or I’m not going to take my phone with me to dinner during the week, I’m not going to take my phone into my bedroom, I’m not going to check my phone during my commute. When you see that it hurts you when you have to leave your phone at home or on the table and you see how much frustration, anxiety and impatience it causes, these emotion-like states, you see that you might have a problem.”
Harrison is also a fan of checking in with yourself to assess what emotional impact this technology is having on you: “If social media use makes you sad or angry, ask yourself if it’s worth it. Everyone should constantly challenge himself or herself about the value of social media. It is it worth my time? Use the technology; don’t let the technology use you.” Oinas-Kukkonen is pragmatic, simply suggesting that you decide how much time you want to spend on social media per week before you even start using services.
Maybe you’ve not noticed any decline in concentration when working and you think your social media use is totally moderate and chill. People are lining up for your tutelage. Still, this technology might be affecting your IRL happiness in ways that you’re not even aware of. Harrison cites social media data as already influencing vital aspects of life like bank loan applications, whether or not you get that great job and whether or not your application for the flat gets accepted or not by landlords. “This is real; it’s happening now and will become more common…You might not have gotten a call for interview for that job you applied for because the company hired a firm to score you based on your social media activity. And, sorry, your mysterious score just wasn’t high enough, and for reasons you will never know.” So what’s the solution? “Be aware of what is going on, first of all, and then be mindful of how much you share about your life online. One doesn’t have to be a Luddite and live off the grid, but it’s very important to think before you share, post, and like.”
In the age of the Facebook data scandal, it might be tempting to delete all of your social media accounts; burn your smartphone and limit communication to letters. But given the convenience of the medium, going cold turkey forever probably isn’t realistic. Perhaps it’s smart to think of our engagement with social media as a marathon, not a sprint. To stay conscious of the little ways these tech channels change us or deplete our ability to engage with difficult issues for undisturbed periods of time. To do the hardest thing of all: ensure moderation in the use of media designed to make devotees binge.
Written by Sophie Atkinson/images by Rosalba Porpora
This month’s theme is HAPPINESS, because March = spring and with it, the knowledge that you’ve made it through the waking nightmare that was winter 2017–8 (RIP).
