Let's Talk About...

27 - Neck, brain, heart and social media

Last year I wrote the draft for a blog post about my feelings of love and hate toward social media. I loved it because it expanded my horizons, gave me access to information and allowed me to connect or reconnect with people that otherwise I would never get in touch with. As for why I hated social media... I felt enslaved by it as I needed to promote my book and was under this constant, never-ending pressure to be on top of it, produce relevant content, be interesting, stay positive. I used Twitter more than anything, and had the impression most people there wanted to promote something (my company, my product, my service, my work, my gig, my cause, my belief, my blog, myself) and everyone was shouting at the same time. It didn't seem like organic communication to me. In general, most relations were superficial and transitory, you engaged in conversation with someone and the communication invariably dwindled until you never heard of that person again because everyone is swimming in an endless sea of people. Far too many people to keep track, let alone manage.

It was fun but also exhausting. I was then balancing a daily job, my writing, a mire of personal problems and big changes in my life. With so much going on, there was no way I would remember to manage my social media several times a day, every day. I decide to gather content (pertinent, entertaining, whimsical, witty, funny, inspiring, useful, insightful as advised by social media experts, and even better if paired with enticing images) and shove it all at once onto Buffer to be released at scheduled times throughout the month, thus sparing myself the worry. I still had to manage follows, communications, likes and shares, but at least I didn't have to think everyday about producing original content.

My brilliant stratagem consumed at least one full weekend collecting, organizing and scheduling content for the month. I did that for one year, meaning I spent altogether over a month out of 12 just managing social media. My results promoting my book in the cyberspace were modest and I was so drained in the end, with all the other things going on in my life plus social media, that I decided to take a break from it. I ended up quitting social media and I can't say I miss it terribly. The way I felt enslaved to it outweighs the fun I had. I fear if I take even a peek into it I'm gonna be sucked in again like into a black hole. So here I am today unearthing that original draft about my feelings toward social media. However, this current version turned out fairly different: it doesn't involve either love or hate but concern.

The most obvious impact of social media is how it interferes in human face-to-face interaction. Between couples, friends, families, and parents and their offsprings, there is an omnipresent cell phone, if not several. Instead of looking into each other's eyes, we often hunch over our phones. We can't just dine at a restaurant, take a hike to be in touch with nature or simply enjoy the moment: we must take photos, share them and check how many likes we get. Instead of living face to face with real life, now we experience it through a screen. A 2013 report by analyst Mary Meeker revealed that Americans checked their phones 150 times a day and uploaded 1.8 billion photos on Facebook every day. We seem to be living more intensely in the virtual world than in the real world. It is as if an event, a landscape or an instant needs to be shared on social media in order to feel complete.

After watching a number of philosophical lectures, I became aware of the narcissism thriving on social media. We live in a narcissistic culture that rewards ambition and is geared toward images, and social media is the epitome of it. Our society rewards looks, status, possessions, and on social media everyone looks happy and seems to be leading an ideal existence packed with thrills, achievements and lots, lots of smiles. We post selfie after selfie after selfie. That word alone should be self-explanatory (no pun intended) in terms of narcissism, but let me elaborate a bit. This narcissism is infantile as it reflects the same kind of self-centeredness found in children, and in that sense we as a society are becoming more infantilized rather than mature. Like children, we also feel entitled to things and thus get prone to frustration if we don't get what we want. Although frustration is a part of life, we're getting bad at dealing with it. We feel grandiose and emit our opinions with arrogance, and the vast majority "thinks" rather than studies a subject in order to "know" it with minimal depth before delivering an opinion.