Image by © Zero Creatives/cultura/Corbis
I’ve been backing off from social media recently. For someone who writes a blog as well as publishing medical apps this may appear to be a risky tactic. In truth this retreat has not been completely voluntary. Something known as “real life” has been seeking my attention and gotten in the way of my online life interactions.
My fascination with social media has always fallen into the “love-hate” category. Maybe “addiction” is a more apropos word than fascination. Social media addiction has supplanted the previous generation of technological addiction, television. Probably a similar fascination or addiction existed when radio was the dominant medium, but I don’t go back that far. The first reaction to television was amazement: “wow, there are moving pictures on the screen.” It didn’t matter that there were only 3 channels in black and white (later expanded slightly by adding fuzzy, low-budget local programs on UHF). Nightly TV viewing became a dominant part of American life in the 50s and 60s. With cable, the number of channels rose, but the signal to noise ratio decreased. TV viewing, passive and mindless to begin with, only got more passive and more mindless. Yet the TV addiction, once begun, could not be shaken, at least not until a stronger drug/soporific became available. I’m afraid that stronger drug is social media on the Internet.
Just as voices decried the huge number of hours that the average American sat in front of the TV set in the past, so too some voices have expressed concern over the tightening grip of social media. There is a lot of good that social media does. It brings together geographically separated folks of similar interests. It is much more active than watching television: people text, message, tweet, post, and blog. But by the same token it is much more seductive — and more readily available, now that everyone carries a smart-phone. Despite social media’s mostly bland and not terribly informative content, withdrawal is difficult. There is anxiety about missing interesting tweets or Facebook posts. By nature of the sheer volume of social media output, the occasional stuff that you might be interested in gets buried in the background noise of cat and baby pictures. So you end up either checking your Twitter or Facebook feed several times a day or living in fear.
Yet somehow the world went on before this torrent of social media posts, and we were none the poorer for its absence or at least living in blissful ignorance of what we were missing. It depresses me to see people walking down the street with their faces buried in their phones, or seemingly talking to the thin air, ignoring what is going on around them; or two people at lunch, staring down at their phones, not talking to each other. How social is social media if it actually decreases our sociability with each other in real life? I am not a Luddite and I don’t want social media to go away completely. Maybe just sometimes. Let’s not lose the delight of person to person conversations over dinner or lunch. Taking a break from social media, whether due to life events, being out in the middle of the ocean somewhere away from WiFi, or just voluntarily chosen, can be a refreshing, mind-clearing act. And the real world has a higher pixel density than your iPhone screen. Take a look!
