‘Despite social media making us more connected than ever before, loneliness is on the rise’.
You’ve likely heard this phrase used time and time again in discourse around social media’s impact on mental health and society in general. The media seems to love highlighting this obvious irony of living in a time where there’s an app for everything and messaging is our primary form of communication. Media talk about this topic as if it’s not our lived reality; as if we’re not so deeply embedded in internet culture that we often can’t see our way out of it.
And because of this, most of us are all too familiar with the ways in which social media fractures how we connect with others in real life. Phone calls have been replaced with half-conversations consisting of back and forth exchanges of TikToks and memes with the occasional non-committal, ‘we should catch up!’. Instead of knocking on peoples’ doors we wait in our cars and text that we’ve arrived. Rather than holding someone’s glance while sitting in a waiting room, we desperately reach for our phones. Commenting on friends’ Instagram pictures constitutes genuine connection.
Every social interaction is considered, planned, drafted in our notes, digitised and mediated through a screen.
While I can only speak for myself, I can’t help but feel that I’m not alone in this overwhelming feeling of loneliness. In this gripping sense of disconnect and isolation as a result of living in a world that is permeated by shares, direct messages, likes, comments and story reacts.
It’s strange to verbalise the ways in which the digital age has built walls between people; how social media has built walls between myself and others. Amid working full time, huddling into train carriages, microwaving dinners, falling asleep with my phone in hand, swallowing down road rage and constantly consuming media I haven’t had time to step back and specify how the digitised world we live in has impacted my life and my relationships. Or rather, I haven’t had time to step back and understand how I actively participate in the digital world.
Mostly because I don’t want to. How is it beneficial for me to identify that my main source of beautifully mind-numbing distraction also leaves me feeling more isolated? What good is pointing out the obvious: that the internet is interfering with genuine connection and my overall quality of life, when it makes my day to day life just that little bit easier? Why should I even bother re-evaluating my relationship with the internet, when extricating myself from its web (internet pun, unfortunately, intended) could only lead to more social isolation?
Maybe you ask yourself the same questions.
While I’m sure there are plenty of people that live outside of the time-consuming world of social media, the idea of deleting my social media accounts feels too hard. And as someone who works in media, living outside or even on the fringes of that world is simply counterintuitive.
So, I continue to scroll. I continue to rely on the internet to get a glimpse at the filtered photos of my friends’ lives because it seems better than not communicating at all in those seemingly expansive periods of time between sporadic coffee dates and birthdays. All the while I mourn a life I wish I could have lived: a life where you could stop by a friend’s house without warning, just to see how they’re doing. A life that was anchored in the present moment rather than in capturing it for some hundreds of people to see via the lens of an iPhone.
Of course I recognise what a luxury it is to complain about these things and that, in practice, I would struggle without the convenience of Google maps, internet banking, instantaneous communication and the rest of it. But in the same token, the world we live in has set up systems and structures to reinforce our reliance on the internet. Consequently, the real world is enmeshed with the digital and so the choice to cut the cord and lead the lives our parents lived isn’t so straight forward.
In short, sometimes I want to throw my phone in the ocean. Anyone else?
