I’m a social media junkie in recovery. I mean, I like to think I’m done using, but don’t leave me alone in a room with it. For me, the gateway drug was MySpace; a lo-fi mélange of gaudy fonts, botched coding and teen angst. A seemingly lawless breeding ground for indie bands and catfish; a place that inexplicably encouraged you to rank your top friends in order of preference. It offered a pioneering new way to be self-indulgent and marked the dawn of a digital phenomenon called ‘over-sharing’.
I quickly graduated from MySpace and enrolled into the school of TMI: Facebook. It was here that I truly honed my social media fixation, uploading entire nights out into dedicated photo albums like ‘Ayia Napa 2008 Part 1’ and ‘Fran’s 21st’. I became so obsessed that I’d spend entire work days scrolling through old school friends to see which ones had got knocked up at uni. It got so bad that my manager eventually blocked the Facebook URL on the office server.
Of course, that didn’t stop me; if anything, it emboldened me, invigorated me. Now it was forbidden fruit. It simply forced me to discover new ways to scratch my itch. Cue the apps. They changed everything. Facebook for Blackberry was perhaps the apex of my addiction. Now, like a nifty little fiend, I could carry my craving around in my back pocket.
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As with many addicts, there was a brief adjournment in my dependency; a short- lived recess that convinced me I’d kicked the habit. Yes, after three years of poking and posting I deactivated my Facebook account and vowed to reclaim my time. Then I discovered Twitter. A new forum for bite-sized commentary and real-time status updates; I was hooked immediately. I approached it like a chatroom, shoving my unsolicited views down the throats of my 38 followers with no real regard for the validity or permanence of my comments. Unlike Facebook and its clean, preppy lines, Twitter was the Wild West, a brand-new landscape of unvetted interaction. It became my go-to social network and, before long, I was posting upwards of 30 tweets a day, racking up new followers by the thousands. I’d bury myself in my phone, sharing lukewarm takes and basking in the endorphins of likes and retweets. Instagram quickly followed, supplementing my social media appetite with a whole new realm of visual exchanges and, just like that, I began to live my life online.
I, like millions of others, allowed social media to integrate itself into my life so seamlessly that using it became second nature. I’d wake up and, as if on autopilot, head straight for Twitter without hesitation. I’d scroll aimlessly for a while, then switch over to Instagram and repeat. The pattern was the same every time I unlocked my phone. Social media became my one-stop news source, convincing me that I was plugged in and up to date. It provided a litmus test for public opinion, a sort of sociopolitical shorthand that made me feel consistently well-informed. Until I realised it was just a user-friendly scam, engineered to elicit my long-term engagement.
Social media is built around the dopamine loop: a compulsive reward system designed to keep you scrolling with variable rewards that make fulfilment entirely unattainable. The average social media user now spends approximately 136 minutes on social networking sites every day. That’s more than 15 hours a week that could be spent reading, cooking, hanging out with your kids, cleaning your oven.
Social media has accelerated and optimised our innate need to connect, but in doing so it has eroded our reality by shifting these exchanges into an exclusively digital space; encouraging us to franchise our identities across two to three social networking platforms at a time. So what once filled me with curiosity and wonder now instils in me a fear unlike any other. Sure, there’s the data mining, surveillance capitalism and general heebie-jeebies you get from knowing your involuntary behaviours are being manipulated by social networking apps and sold on to the highest bidder. But on top of that is my very real concern that social media is unravelling the tapestry of humanity.
With every click-bait headline, reflection is replaced with reaction, community replaced with tribalism, imperfections replaced with filters, contentment replaced with comparison. We exaggerate and enhance in an attempt to stand out, when it is in fact our quiet vulnerability that makes us human. We forfeit our anonymity every single day and at what cost? Sharing pictures of our weddings and new babies or uploading pictures of partners that become exes – leaving behind digital breadcrumbs of the lives we used to lead. We disclose our half-baked thoughts in an attempt to join the conversation, tethering ourselves to opinions that later change, judging each other based on Twitter posts and photo reels, rather than on what we know to be true.
It took me 10 years to realise that excessive social media use was not conducive to a happy life. My 30 tweets a day have become one tweet every 30 days (which, working in the entertainment industry, is a lot like being a department store with no shop front). I no longer weigh in on hot topics or argue with strangers online. I share personal pictures sparingly. I don’t even know how TikTok works. But that works for me.
Social media is unquestionably an era-defining innovation. It is an awe- inspiring thing that has revolutionised the way the world communicates. But in changing the way we come together, I worry that it has also made it easier for us to fall apart. So be sure that when you’re using social media, it isn’t actually using you.
Apple Music host Ashley ‘Dotty’ Charles is the author of ‘Outraged: Why Everyone Is Shouting And No One Is Talking’. She is also a contributing editor for Grazia, writing thought-provoking opinion pieces, personal essays and more