I’m at lunch, scrolling through my phone. I mindlessly eat my food all the while staring at Facebook. What am I looking at? Nothing, really; the lives of other people: what they are doing, their holidays, their children, their exercise routine. I tell myself I keep in touch with Facebook for work, I tell myself I must be on social media to find the stories I need to do my job. It is partially true but, without doubt, I don’t need to scroll through it for literally hours a day.
finish work, I sit on the couch, switch on the TV, and again I scroll through Facebook. I see books I might like to read, clothes I definitely would like to buy. Time passes. I go down a rabbit hole and forget the TV’s even on. I switch to Twitter for a look; I have an account there, too, but I rarely tweet, just scroll and pass time.
Sound familiar? It is probably what most of us do, even if we don't want to admit it.
Facebook is my site, and now I have given away my age! I rarely use Instagram and I have yet to embrace TikTok. I am sure there are more sites I know nothing about.
Social-media tech companies have hit headlines this week, with job losses worldwide, and there are now widespread fears that Twitter may be on the road to nowhere. Facebook's parent company, Meta, has also announced job losses, and who knows the effect this will have on Facebook.
I'm sure other social-media sites will come to the fore instead; I see some mention of Mastodon replacing Twitter, or at least people migrating to it from Twitter. We have gone so far down the world of social media that it is hard to imagine it completely disappearing.
But all this focus on job losses, the fears for the future of these companies and their sites, got me thinking: what would I do without social media?
What would my life be like if I couldn't scroll through the phone during every spare minute I have. Recently I found myself in an area that had no mobile-phone reception and I had no access to WiFi – so no phone, no social media.
I literally panicked; how were people going to contact me? Of course that is important, but unlikely to be the end of the world. My panic had more to do with the void left by the scrolling time taken from me.
But I missed nothing and actually paid attention to what was happening around me. It made me contemplate my phone and social-media use.
We see articles about being addicted to our phones, but they tend to mis-frame the issue. Surely it’s social media we’re addicted to, and phones are only the vehicle we need to indulge that addiction. We mostly choose to ignore the root cause of why we’re glued to phones.
You may say we are just socialising, staying in contact with people, finding information, working or shopping. And we do all those things, but do we really need social-media sites such as Twitter and Facebook, and do they really add to our lives?
How would we fill the void? Would me mindlessly watch TV, and is that much better? Or maybe we’d read a book, go for walk, meet a friend or just chat to our family or housemates. Would we stop focussing on what everyone else is doing and instead get active ourselves?
We all know, deep down, that social media sucks us in, makes us compare our lives to others, or puts us under pressure to live up to ideals that don’t really exist. It also supports consumerism and makes us buy things we don't need. I am bombarded by ads for gym wear these days, and I really want to by some, but I don't need it. That doesn’t stop me spending hours looking at new running leggings. And once you start looking at these ads, you keep seeing them.
The dangers of social media and the abuse that people are subjected to have been more than highlighted, yet we continue to use it, supporting this vehicle by which people attack others in a way they didn’t before the turn of the millennium.
I understand that social media plays a part in my job but is definitely time to consider how I use it outside of that.
If I didn't scroll through social media, apparently I would have more than three hours a day to do other things; that’s the time an app tells me I spend on social media daily. If some sites reach their Waterloo, maybe it is not such a bad thing. It might even persuade me back to reading and walking and living in the real world.
