The Anti-Social Media

An idea meant to unite people from across the globe simultaneously leaves us feeling even more alone.

BY: CLAUDIA MINARDI

Artwork by Edward Hopper

“I am the center of the universe, I keep you alive, without me, you would be lost. What am I?”

Did you guess the sun? Air? Maybe light?

Those are all right in a sense, but the correct answer is social media. It’s the reason we wake up in the morning and why we go to bed so late. It’s why we can’t finish our assignments in one sitting and why we lose track of time and scramble to hand things in at the last minute. 

I often wonder how we got to this point, our lives run by this digital kingdom. Constantly proving our loyalty to apps like Instagram or Twitter by spending hours scrolling, commenting, and wasting away. It was only a few years ago, I was racing around in the park, sneakers colliding with pavement as I tried to win a game of freeze tag with my friends. Today, I don’t see kids having the same experience. Instead they are becoming internet sensations, being raised by social media. 

And it isn’t even their fault. I guess it’s just inevitable– the popularity of social media exploded and young kids simply have access to what years ago would have been off limits. 

To revisit my question, how did we get to this point? 

Social media has been in development for a while, however the breakthrough was a site launched in 1997 called SixDegrees.com. It was a milestone for social media, allowing users to create their own profiles, add “friends”, and register via email. The website was named after the theory “Six Degrees of Separation,” which hypothesizes that two people randomly selected from anywhere in the world would be connected in six steps or less. 

The theory was very influential on network studies and has even inspired the game “Six Degrees Of Kevin Bacon.” In the 1990’s, there was a challenge to link an actor to Kevin Bacon in only six steps. For example, Rodney Dangerfield was in the movie “Caddyshack” alongside Bill Murray, who then co-starred in “She’s Having a Baby” with none other than Kevin Bacon. 

SixDegrees.com puts the iconic theory into practice, giving people the ability to expand your connections and reach others globally. The site was home to almost 3.5 million users before it was shut down a few years later. Despite its short lifespan, SixDegrees.com birthed the beginning of the social media takeover. 

Soon after, LiveJournal was launched. The site was formatted as a personal diary, where users could post their deepest thoughts and wishes, while commenting and interacting with others. It encouraged self expression; you could pour your soul into your writing and others would listen.

Linkedin arrived in 2002 and immediately set itself apart from the other social media sites by shifting its target audience to the business world. Used as a virtual networking medium between professionals, LinkedIn has more than 575 million members. 

Around the same time, MySpace was launched and, unlike LinkedIn, focused on the young adult community. It was a place to meet others with similar interests, customize your profile, and share music. Similar to the social media sites mentioned thus far, communication at a global scale was at MySpace’s core.

Next is arguably the most popular social media website: Facebook. Created by Mark Zuckerburg in 2004, Facebook was originally only for Harvard students to keep in contact with one another. And as you know, since we’ve all seen the movie The Social Network, it eventually expanded to other campuses and then to anyone in the world over 13 years old. Today, it’s home to over 2.7 billion users, meaning nearly 30 percent of the world’s total population is on Facebook.

To rapidly fire off the rest of the social media history, after Facebook came Flickr, an online photo-album site. 

Twitter arrived on the scene in 2006. It was more of a discourse based platform, allowing users to quickly interact with different accounts. Unlike the other sites, Twitter implemented a character limit, so the app was (and still is) mainly used for concise thoughts, quick opinions, and life updates. 

Tumblr paid homage to the blog format that kicked off early social media sites. Pinterest was another addition to the image-based apps, and Instagram followed shortly after. Snapchat joined the social media circle in 2011 and brought a unique concept to the table. The pictures and videos that are sent through the app disappear within seconds of being viewed.

Then came Twitch, the live streaming site, followed by Tinder, the dating/hookup app. 

Vine, although short lived, paved the way for creative content within a time limit. After Vine, Music.ly, the lip syncing app was launched (and shut down a couple years later). 

TikTok is the most recent addition to the social media family. Seen as an extension of Vine, the app is home to mostly teens and young adults who create skits, dances, and original content. 

Art by Edward Hopper

We truly have come a long way from SixDegrees.com. We are more interconnected than ever, we can message family members from other countries, have video study sessions with friends during quarantine, and even laugh at some clever TikToks. But social media can also be the wolf in sheep’s clothing, seemingly harmless from the outside yet hiding a dark secret.

Despite its achievement of bringing the world closer together, of bridging that gap between 7.5 billion people, social media causes emotional distance between its users. It’s ironic how an idea meant to unite people from across the globe simultaneously leaves us feeling even more alone.

I personally believed social media was this exclusive item you must have in order to be cool, as juvenile as that sounds. In my defense, I was 11 and my friends couldn’t stop talking about “what happened on Instagram last night” or “who followed them back.” It was difficult to be in the conversation, but still an outsider. So to me, social media was this key that would allow me to be accepted into this special community.

I finally got my wish, five years later, when I turned 16. 

At that point, I had wondered how I survived so long without an Instagram account. I spent hours scrolling, commenting, and DMing my friends, and most of all, I believed that my days of feeling excluded were over. 

It’s not exactly a shock to say I was wrong, really wrong. 

I started to notice this strange heaviness in my stomach a few months after I got my account. Whenever I saw my friends posting about their daily adventures, I suddenly felt as if I was pushed away. I didn’t quite understand it; I was a social media user now, the bonds between my friends and I should be strengthening. 

Instead, they were severing, slowly, but steadily. 

These feelings only amplified when I started university and exploded during the pandemic.

I’ve spent some time trying to combat this isolation. Social media breaks have proven to be temporary solutions to this pressing problem. 

However, in order to actually improve my state of mind, I wanted to get to the root cause.

So, here are three main reasons why social media creates a bubble of isolation that distances us from the ones we care about.

Constantly Feeling Inadequate

Instagram is a cesspool of fake happiness, I think this is common knowledge. It’s filled to the brim of smiles and highlights, but makes no room for the mundane moments in life. Somehow, every user is living their best life, free of negativity.

There are Instagram influencers who quite literally influence the way we think about our lives. Suddenly, there is a standard we feel pressured to live up to, and if we are not on that level, we are left with this emptiness. 

It is not only the presence of influencers that bring upon these feelings of inadequacy. I often find myself comparing my life to what my own friends post. After high school, my close circle parted ways, attending different universities all across the province. The only way of keeping in touch was through social media. At first, this didn’t affect me; I loved to hear about their classes or the people they met or how orientation was for each of them.

After a while though, I started to question why I felt a weight on my shoulders whenever I liked my friends’ posts. They were out there having fun, chasing their newfound freedom and truly living the official university experience.

Shouldn’t I be happy for them?

Art by Edward Hopper

In all honesty, I felt like my own life was falling short, compared to what I was seeing on social media. As absurd as it sounds, there was a part of me that believed I wasn’t an authentic university student because my experiences didn’t match up with others my age.

The girl from my grade 12 English class was attending parties multiple times a week, and even though I personally am not a party person, I couldn't help but think her life was much more glamorous than my own. 

A rift was formed between my friends and I, and I was unsure if I could even relate to them anymore. They seemed to have these eventful social lives and at the time, a part of me felt inferior. Were we no longer on the same level, and how far did I have to climb to fix this distance? 

It’s easy to say that social media isn’t transparent. In fact, I am often the one to remind others of the “fakeness” of Instagram. It’s different when you are on the other end, though. I couldn’t find it in myself to step back for a moment and genuinely consider that there was more to the story, a struggle behind the smiling faces in the pictures. To me, everyone was living out their own happy adventures while I was stuck watching their lives play out on an app.

Left on Read...Yet Again

Read receipts are an aspect of social media that I will never understand. 

I think they add unnecessary stress and frustrations to users. There’s something upsetting about knowing who viewed your message and the exact time they did so. In this case, ignorance would be bliss, as I could convince myself that the person I’m trying to contact isn’t online. Read receipts instantly alert you that, yes, they are online and yes, they saw your text and no, they won’t be responding anytime soon. 

The feeling of being left on read was becoming all too familiar for me. I would log onto social media, say a few things to my friends in the group chat, and watch as their icons sunk to the bottom of the screen, where they stayed for days. 

Time would pass and I wouldn’t get a response. It made me feel like I did something wrong. Did I say something I wasn’t supposed to say? Did they find me annoying? I was suddenly second-guessing my actions to the people I had known for years, feeling as though I was communicating with strangers. 

Looking back, I don’t necessarily think my friends were fed up with me. I genuinely believe they forgot to respond. That is another problem with read receipts: the requirement to instantly text back. It singles you out if you are the first one to open a message. Suddenly, your name and the time are flashing along the bottom of the chat, and you need to come up with a reply quickly or else it looks like you don’t care.

Because of these unspoken rules, opening messages is almost a chore. You need to be mentally prepared to text back, and if you don’t feel up to it, you need to find a way to avoid the message. 

With this in mind, I had two things eating away at me: constantly being the one left on read and feeling the obligation to be the first to respond. 

FOMO

If New York is the city that never sleeps, then social media is the city that’s on their sixth cup of coffee and it’s only nine in the morning. It’s safe to say that there is no bedtime in the world of Instagram. 

It’s great because it connects people from all over the world, but ironically that’s also the reason why social media is so exhausting. There are people posting and commenting and tweeting at all hours of the day. 

In today’s fast-paced world, missing a post the second it was uploaded is basically a crime. There is an obligation to constantly be online and to set up notifications so that you’re always the first to know. 

This all revolves around the term “Fear of Missing Out,” or more commonly abbreviated as FOMO.

Suddenly, there is no such thing as time for yourself, since you have to always be connected. If you go out, you turn your data on so that you will still be notified of the things you miss. 

It’s not only for posting. FOMO can also overlap with feelings of having an inadequate lifestyle. I’ve experienced FOMO even being on a group chat with my friends. We spam each other so much that it takes days to scroll to where you last left off. Anxiety begins to unfold in my stomach as I begin the trek to the top of the chat, fearing I am missing out on a new inside joke, or a meetup date, or some major news. 

The problem with this is that we are so caught up with always being online that we forget we need to be present in the real world. Social media can have a nasty impact on our mental health, simply because we are forgetting to nurture ourselves. 

FOMO anxiety can be self-destructive, and we have to make sure that we return to the real world to check up on ourselves. 

Art by Edward Hopper

So How Do We Fix This Disconnect?

As a reader, my words may have unlocked similar memories in your own life. Perhaps you’ve personally gone through experiences that closely relate with my own. Your friends’ posts left you feeling inadequate, or you have post notifications on so that you can be in the first ten likes, or you’ve been left on read for days and wondering if you should double text.

But these experiences aren’t unique. They’re not unheard of, in fact they’re common.

So what? We all know that social media can breed these painful feelings, that’s nothing special.

The problem is that social media is painted to be the pinnacle of our lives and we simply shouldn’t allow that. Especially while in quarantine, social media has been this constant escape, this shoulder of support, and I for one have retreated into it. However, at the same time, we need to break free from it and learn how to be human because it can leave you feeling burnt. 

Mental health for sure takes a hit during increased social media consumption and in this crazy time where we have no idea what the state of the world is in, we need to take care of ourselves

Let’s move away from the problem and onto the solution: how do we heal from the damage that has been done? 

Living as a young adult in the 21st century, it’s next to impossible to quit social media entirely. There are memes circulating about how social media breaks really only last about a couple days at the most.

The focus should not be on eliminating social media entirely, but the feeling of loneliness it instills in us. 

Throughout my first year of university and during quarantine, I have become all too familiar with social media making me feel terrible. I would open the app, close it, and open it again to see if anything has changed. I would stare at DMs forever, waiting for someone to respond. I would constantly refresh my feed in hopes that something brand new would appear on my screen.

Worst of all, I believed I was straying away from the people I cared about. I became a shell of what I was, and I needed help becoming human again.

Journaling

I immediately took up journaling when I felt I couldn’t hold in my feelings anymore. I was scared about the virus, I was angry about injustices in the world, and I was overwhelmed by these emotions that wouldn’t fade away. 

What I didn’t realize is the more I repressed these feelings, the more it ate away at me from the inside. To be frank, I felt so isolated from my friends and the world, and social media wasn’t helping. 

I knew I had to release these thoughts somewhere, and to ease my anxiety about burdening others with my problems, I opened an empty notebook and began to write. 

It was messy, my handwriting was sloppy and shaky. I raced through each sentence as the emotions started spilling out of me and onto the page. My hand ached from all the writing but I refused to quit until I was empty. Before I knew it, I had filled up pages with my worries, stresses, and internal dialogue. All of these thoughts I had kept locked up now had a home. 

Learning an Instrument

Music has always been a big interest of mine and I am a big believer that teaching yourself how to play an instrument is one of the best experiences. When I started high school, I picked up the ukulele and I haven’t been able to put it down since. Until I started university. Suddenly, I didn’t have time for my music anymore and I put all my time into my school work. When the quarantine was implemented and my first year of university was over, I decided to reunite with my instrument.

I personally find it extremely cathartic to play an instrument. Not to mention it is an effective distraction from any problem. It’s an involved process, from choosing a song of your preferred difficulty, to learning the chord shapes, strumming pattern, and finally putting it all together. I could play for hours and not realize how much time has gone by. 

I found that the energy I put into reconnecting with my instrument worked in my favour. My feelings of isolation due to my social media use were lessened the more I dove into my music. 

Nature

Another great way to escape social media and the isolation that follows is to go outside if you are able to/have access. During the quarantine, I felt cooped up and suffering from cabin fever in the dead of summer. My skin was screaming for some natural light and my lungs craved fresh air. 

However, everything was uncertain. Were we allowed to go on walks? What was the protocol? How high is the risk if I leave my house, and is a walk considered a necessary outing?

So I ventured into my backyard instead. Full disclosure, my backyard is tiny. It’s awkwardly shaped with a steep slope that I used to tumble down as a child in order to keep myself entertained.

But at this time, the backyard seemed bigger than ever before. So I sat on the deck and closed my eyes and felt the sun tingle my skin. I left my phone inside and focused on the cicadas humming, the summer heat, and the way the empty feeling inside me was slowly beginning to close.

My backyard went from being this small patch of grass to my own personal sanctuary. I found myself frequently escaping out onto the deck. 

Those feelings of isolation were fading  because I was finally connecting to something: nature. 

Art by Edward Hopper

So…Now What?

So, have I done it? Did I take the leap of faith and deactivate all my social media accounts?

No, I haven’t. 

I’m in no way free from the shackles of social media. I still scroll on Instagram frequently, but I’ve learned to limit myself. It’s easy to get caught up in the glamour of Instagram, but as we all know, it’s all an illusion.

This quarantine has given me a chance to reflect and evaluate how social media affects my life, both positively and negatively. I still communicate with my friends regularly, but I have disabled unnecessary notifications so there isn’t an urgency to be online and respond at all hours of the day.

I can almost guarantee that everyone has had at least one bad experience with social media, whether it be for the reasons I’ve discussed or for one that wasn’t mentioned. 

 Moral of the story is that we must remember social media is a tool, meaning it grants us easier access to stay connected. That doesn’t give it a free pass to overtake your life.

In this whirlwind of uncertainty, be sure to take care of yourself. If that calls for a bit of a break from Instagram, then so be it.

Life is tough, social media doesn’t help with that, and we deserve to be happy.

We deserve to feel okay.