A few weeks ago I read a blog post by the fabulous Liz
Gilbert (author Eat, Pray, Love) about how she had been taking a “Digital
Sabbath,” every weekend to make space for quiet time, reflection, family, friends,
reading an actual book, that kind of thing. This coincided with me working on a
writing exercise about the problems with social media, so I was, admittedly,
primed for the message when it appeared on my news feed. And, I have to tell
you, I instantly fell in love with the idea. I also knew, just as instantly,
that a complete digital break was not going to work for me. My husband and I
have put significant effort into downsizing and living smaller over the past
decade, almost everything in our house is digital, including our books, movies,
and music. I didn’t want to dismiss the idea completely, so, I’ve been taking a
Social Media Sabbath every weekend for the past three weeks. It was embarrassingly
tough to log out of Facebook, Blogger, Twitter, Pinterest - all my favorite
drugs - set up an auto-reply message on my email account, and then stay off for
the whole weekend, but it has been a very productive, and introspective time.
I realize that productivity wasn’t exactly the point, but
relaxation doesn’t seem to be in my wheelhouse lately. I’ll be happy to chill
out when the weather changes and there’s nothing to do but watch the snow fall.
What I have been doing is cooking, spending time with my hubby, and our family
without my iPhone and iPad getting in the way. Yes, I posed with my nieces for
an insane number of Snapchat photos over the Memorial Day Weekend, but I wasn’t
the one taking them, and I got more enjoyment out of seeing them laughing at
our silliness than I ever could out of someone hitting the like button.
Don’t get me wrong, I love my on-line life. I love
reconnecting with old friends, and being a witness to everything they are
doing: the big, and the small. Social media has been a great boon to many, with
great qualities in its favor. However, as important to me as my Facebook and
Blog are, there are downsides to a connected life. It’s become normal for me to
check my phone, or tablet first thing in the morning, or even in the middle of
the night, to see if my social media friends have done anything interesting
while I was sleeping. It’s become a completely normal part of everyday life,
and it’s so quick and easy, that it has replaced picking up the phone and
actually calling friends, and relatives in order to find out what they’re up
to.
The troubling thing is, our brains aren’t designed for the
21st century: we don’t have the bandwidth. We’re so busy tweeting,
poking, skyping, pinning and liking things to really know what’s going on in
our own heads. There is no doubt around the fact that social media is designed
to appeal to our dopamine response mechanism, and can become as detrimentally
addictive as any drug, food, or bad habit. We cannot control all of the content
of our news feed, some of it may be (usually is) distressing, whether it’s sad
puppies or earthquakes, our brains cannot tell if the danger, or distress is
thousands of miles away, or right behind us. Our dopamine receptors may be
taking a hit every time someone likes that funny thing we said – and why
wouldn’t they, we’re all hilarious – but
our brains are also spewing out stress chemicals like adrenaline, and cortisol
all day long. Eventually all that over-stimulation leads to burnout and empathy
fatigue. Social media so successfully mimics connection on a biochemical level,
that we gradually lose our ability to connect with each other outside of an App.
Most of us are only partly fooled by the biochemical mechanisms in our brains,
we know the real-deal drugs of laughter, conversation, touch, sex, and presence that come from interacting with others in the flesh. Social media can only function as a
kind of emotional patch, a stand in for the real thing. It is completely
possible that the pituitary glands of future generations will adapt to the
pervasiveness of technology in our lives, but for now we’re stuck with some
pretty ancient equipment ratting around in our heads. It’s elegant,
sophisticated, and beautiful, but there are certain bugs in the firmware.
Our profiles, as personal as they might be to us, provide a
kind of buffer for our actions. This cushion enables us – to greater or lesser
degree - to inflate our successes and hide our defeats behind someone else’s
uplifting message. In the end, what many of us develop is an online persona
that provides our private vulnerable selves with a degree of anonymity. An unfortunate
side effect of this is that we become divorced from our actions, and others
become disposable and infinitely replaceable. This separation enables some of
us to be incredibly cruel to others in the form of trolling, and cyber
bullying. Social medias pervasiveness in our lives, and the hold it has on our
emotional state via dopamine, adrenaline, and cortisol makes cyber bullying all
the more potent to those being bullied. Nobody is saying mean things to you in
a specific context, they’re putting it in writing in front of everyone you know
and are connected to. As much as I believe in personal responsibility,
anonymity provides the perfect shield for less ethical people to act as poorly
as they feel entitled to act with very little risk of reprisal. The shield of
anonymity, the very thing we need to protect ourselves from harm, is the same
thing that stops us from connecting in any kind of authentic way.
Nothing in life is free. Most social media outlets do not
charge their users because they are not the real consumer. The content we
create and share is not impotent: we are the product being sold. Our clicks,
our likes, our preferences are being tracked. That information is being
stripped from our identity, bundled, used, and sold to market researchers,
while time in front of our eyeballs is being sold to advertisers. We live in an
increasingly public world, privacy is a precious commodity, and social media
constantly encourages us to give away our privacy unwisely. I know, I know, I’m
on social media RIGHT NOW, but too many of us are not aware of, nor manage
their privacy appropriately. At the precise moment our lives are becoming
public, our privacy – our only asset and means of protecting ourselves from
harm – is being sold off to the highest bidding corporation. Just like our
brains are not hardwired from this much information, we aren’t socially evolved
enough, yet, to handle social media responsibly. This is how you get a
generation of individuals who won’t change in a locker room at the gym, but
will freely send a “dick pic” to anyone they think might be interested. We don’t
even have a working model – as a society – of appropriate online behavior.
Given social medias pervasiveness; its ability to reward our
dopamine receptors, the cocoon of anonymity, its ability to so exquisitely mimic
connection and make us feel like we’re never really alone, we have begun to
spend so much time on line that many of us don’t know how to sit down and have
a real conversation anymore. There is no discourse. People can be deleted and
blocked without having to deal with any uncomfortable conversations.
We don’t work through difficulties: we just walk away from them. Sometimes that
is the best, in fact, the only reasonable action we can take, but it is
becoming the societal default. The way we’re hardwired to experience connection
is though story, shared events, the touch of a hand, a smile, the sound of a voice,
or plain old physical proximity to the people we care about most. We might be
able to tell our stories, make each other laugh, and share a picture of a
smile, but that will likely never replace the real thing.
Although I’m always available via text message and phone, taking
a Social Media Sabbath has been a good object lesson, and it’s a habit a I plan
to continue. I truly value the people on my friends list, and the time I’ve
spent connecting with them – on whatever ever level possible – is not time
wasted. I do, however, need to keep perspective, and direct some of that energy
into my work and life. I don’t think participating in social media needs to be
a zero sum game because it is, in and of itself, neither good nor bad: it has
its benefits and it has its flaws. We can, and should, choose when and how to
participate. To do that, we need to recognize what it is we’re doing, understand
the consequences of our actions, and who is benefiting from our choices. Then
we can begin to set appropriate boundaries for ourselves so that we don’t
become chained to our devices every moment of our waking day.
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