Social Media Is Not Normal
It’s stupid, is what it is. That somehow, we’ve all been collectively duped into thinking that this is normal. That this is the way it has always been, and whatever we’re doing now is perfectly and completely ordinary.
The problem is that it’s not. This isn’t normal; it simply can’t be.
It can’t possibly be normal to feel physically compelled to whip out your phone at every meal, just so you can take a snapshot of your overpriced café food and post it up on Instagram, not forgetting to #brunch because certainly, after all this effort, it is the additional seasoning of likes and envious comments that give your meal (and your ego) that extra kick of flavour.
It can’t be normal to want to broadcast every thought — good, bad or anything in between — onto Twitter. (Which, if you really think about it, is the social media equivalent of yelling out “HAVE TO TRIM MY HAIR AGAIN. WHY DOES THIS KEEP HAPPENING?” into a megaphone in the middle of the day to a group of people; as if it is not common knowledge that hair just grows and, unless you’re going for a look, that the trims will keep on having to happen.)
It can’t be normal to continually have a digital window displaying the lives of your thirty-odd primary school classmates via your Facebook walls, even if it’s been almost two decades since you’ve last seen any of them, and you’ve forgotten most of their names, yet are somehow still allowed to view photos of their new born babies. By no means is it your fault, but it still feels a little creepy…
This is definitely not normal.
‘But it’s to document my life,’ you may argue.
To which, a possible rebuttal would be: ‘What for?’
Surely not all our lives are remarkable enough to warrant every moment and every thought being captured in photographic and/or written form, especially since evidence shows that almost nobody truly cares about them in the first place.
Maybe you are doing it to be considerate — it is possible that the anthropologists and historians of future generations may gain from us keeping tabs on our every waking moments. Perhaps years from now, your Facebook profile will be important in determining population census statistics — provided not every detail in it is fabricated, of course.
(But surely, nobody — not even future anthropologists — has the need for the fifteen million search results of #salad on Instagram.)
Undoubtedly, it may be validating to impart our experiences with others and discover that we are not alone in our struggles. Perhaps reading that one positive comment complimenting your outfit is enough to help build your self-confidence that you get to live the rest of your day feeling good about yourself.
But where do we draw the line between sharing and oversharing? When do we know that we’ve crossed the threshold of inoffensive into the realm of the obnoxious? Is it expression or is it bragging? Is this body positivity or inappropriate? Is it being candid or is it being naïve?
We share with our followers our homes, our family members, our daily routines, and sometimes (but always, always, idiotically) our personalised credit cards. We often do so without a second thought to what kind of underlying malice hides behind our tempered glass screens — malice that is more that capable of using the gigabytes of personal information that we unwittingly and voluntarily give up for the world to see to their advantage.
Perhaps it would be good if we were to bear in mind that discontented exes aren’t the only ones lurking behind our social media feeds — that malintent can exist in places like the internet, where we are often lulled into a false sense of security. Perhaps we ought to consider how other people may feel when we post that selfie of us decked out in designer brands, or on vacation — that humility is by far a more desirable trait than boosting our own insecurities with frivolity. And perhaps we should understand that what we see as trivial fun may have serious real-world consequences.
Perhaps it would also benefit us to just admit to ourselves we have a problem. Social media camouflages itself underneath the glitz and the supposed authenticity of thought, when really, it is a powerful drug of the modern digital age — and we are more addicted than we realize.
You can’t sleep.
It’s insomnia, you tell yourself and anybody that will listen. It’s the insomnia that’s keeping you awake at night, and scrolling through Instagram is just something you do so you would have something to do.
But the reality is the exact opposite. Social media isn’t the result of your crippling inability to sleep — it’s the cause of it. The dim blue light of your phone messes with your brain’s ability to distinguish between night and day, and you’re suffering as a result.
And suddenly it’s five in the morning, you’ve Snapchatted your way through yet another anxiety-fuelled, late-night existential crisis, retweeted approximately four random thoughts that went through your mind in the past hour (that deep down, you know nobody cares about), and unwittingly confessed to a felony you committed in 2005 via an angsty Facebook post.
It’s at this point that you realize — you’re an idiot.
Yet, without fail, it happens again every single night.
