What’s the Point of All This?
Photo by Christy Jacob on Unsplash
This is the fourth part of a series on social media and how to understand its impacts on our lives. In the first entry, I talked about the evolution of social media platforms from the mid-aughts til now. In the second, I talked about what it means for us to be social animals. In the third, I talked about why bigger platforms cause greater harm. In the next and final entry, I give some practical tips for forging boundaries about social media in your daily life.
If we thought of our own bodies and their functions as pieces of technology, we would realize that we are already equipped with the most advanced, miraculous machinery we could imagine.
What software could replicate the feel of the wind on your face during a morning run? What LLM could possibly reflect you as intimately as your own dreams and subconscious? What smart glasses could possibly make a sunset more beautiful than the naked eye? What social media connection could possibly carry as much weight and worth as a friendship forged from physically spending hours together doing nothing in particular?
Technology, perhaps our entire way of life, has made a dangerous error in assuming that its primary goal is to reduce friction.
Friction is necessary. You must go to the gym and put yourself through discomfort in order to maintain your body. You must play guitar badly before you can play well. The friction isn’t an inconvenience, it’s a lesson in how to be a person. As the old saying goes, chop your own firewood, and it will warm you twice.
Without friction, atrophy and apathy set in rather quickly. As I go through my daily life, and think about how social media is shaping our world, our children, our future, I can only feel that it could take us down the wrong road.
It’s undermining our amazing biological machinery.
It’s creating a world where we don’t have to look one another in the eye.
The millennial vantage point
A friend of mine relayed a conversation she had with her 13-year-old neighbor, we’ll call her Grace. Grace had posted to social media from an event where she was hanging out with a friend. She said that because her friend didn’t like her post, she and the friend aren’t friends, even though they know each other and talk in person.
For Gen Z and Gen Alpha, the social signifiers of the digital world outweigh lived relational experiences in the physical world.
We can all agree that online relationships and interactions are less valuable and less fulfilling. But they are also far less risky. Kids are more comfortable on social media because they have more control over their interactions, how they’re perceived, and whether they’re seen at all. Teens fear nothing more than being embarrassed. They simply can’t resist the safety of living through a social media platform, of side-stepping the friction of being a person in the world.
Their social muscles atrophy, and they miss out on key developmental moments. Millennials colonized the internet, but we lived in a time before it. As such, our online selves and behaviors are rooted in our physical selves and IRL behaviors. Gen Z and younger are true digital natives, with behaviors and attitudes shaped entirely by being online.
The problem with that is: our physical, social, and emotional lives are ultimately arbitrated by our biological equipment. By bypassing that equipment through technology, to avoid friction, we create whole new epidemics.
Social media is contributing to an epidemic of anxiety and depression among everyone, but particularly more-online young people.
Kids are not hanging out face-to-face as much. The rates of hanging out drop off a cliff around 2010, with the advent of smartphones.
Kids are losing the ability to read full books due to the constant consumption of short-form content.
People in general are not having as much sex, which will slow our nation’s population growth and create labor shortages, inflation, and other disruptions.
How can such a society grow up to be capable of steering their society and the world in a positive direction?
Adults suffer, too
The pandemic caused our collective social muscles to atrophy. But even before that, I recall thinking of “being social” as an activity. Going to a dinner party felt like a necessary workout for those social muscles.
This point of view embodies our dysregulation from our biological characteristics of being social animals. I.e., being social shouldn’t be something you have to go out and do. Being social is moving through the world in a way that acknowledges and celebrates that we are not the only ones in it, a way that is dignified and dignifying, pleasurable and pleasant – and grounding.
That means making small talk with your Uber driver and actually being interested. Calling an old friend instead of texting them. Looking the grocery store cashier in the eye and saying “Thank you” — and meaning it. Knowing your neighbor’s name and remembering what they said last time you crossed paths. Asking the wine store clerk what selection would be best, instead of looking it up on your phone.
Being social IRL shouldn’t feel like friction, but social media and technology have helped make it feel that way.
We break up through text, have hard conversations through email, trade barbs over politics on X, get dates through Tinder, outsource customer support to AI. Along the way, we lose politeness, decency, and courtesy.
I would argue these are more than aesthetic niceties. They make us civilized and human, connected and kind. I fear what we become without them.
Ask for better from technology
Social media isn’t the only context in which humans seek to avoid friction. People use porn and sex workers to get gratification without relationship. They use drugs and alcohol to avoid the friction of their inner conflicts.
Avoiding the friction of being social allows us to forget that other people are equally real and human. We end up treating them as disposable, as mere impositions to whatever our personal goal or desire might be. Our view of the world becomes extractive. The equation of life and society becomes, “How much can I get? How little can I get away with giving for it?” We forget that this world, this life, is a group project.
I would like to see a reorientation around our expectations of technology and our perceptions of what it should do at a fundamental level.
Technology mistakenly assumes that if something can be made easier, then it’s better for us. We have to stop and ask, what behaviors, tasks, and habits are demonstrably good for us? Which tasks are detrimental but necessary? How can technology turn up the former and turn down the later?
Protect your house
Within your own household, how often does your kid see or interact with you without a phone in your hand? Kids need the practice, fulfillment, and validation that comes from parents and kids giving each other their full attention. To prevent social media and smart phone addiction in our children, we must first conquer, or at least acknowledge, our own addictions to them.
As parents, we also have to give our kids an anchor in real-world behaviors before turning them loose online. For me, I have my son write in longform, by hand with punctuation, capital and lowercase letters, and so on. I’d like him to make a thousand phone calls before he gets to write a text message.
In the next and final entry to this series, I’ll take a more practical angle and offer some ways to create speed bumps around technology and social media in your own household and family.
Until then, pick up the phone and call someone. I dare you.