Is the social media a force for good?
The evidence is growing that social media can be a
health risk, particularly for young people
Matthaig
I used to think social media was essentially a force for good, whether it was to initiate the Arab Spring of 2011, or simply as a useful tool for bringing together like-minded people to share videos of ninja cats. Having spent a lot of time thinking about mental health, I even saw social medias much-maligned potential for anonymity as a good thing, helping people to open up about problems when they might not feel able to do so in that physical space we still quaintly call real life.
I also knew from my own experience that it could sometimes provide a happy distraction from the evil twins of anxiety and depression. I have made friends online. As an author, its also been a great way to test new ideas, and has taken storytelling from its castle in the sky back down to the metaphorical (now hashtag-heavy) campfire. As someone who often finds social situations mentally exhausting, social media seemed far more solution than problem.
Yes, I would occasionally feel that maybe staring at my Twitter feed near-continuously for seven hours wasnt that healthy, especially when I was arguing with an army of Trump fans telling me to jump off a cliff. Yes, Id see articles warning of the dangers of excessive internet use, but I dismissed these as traditional, reactionary takes. I saw social media naysayers as the first reviewers of Technicolor movies, who felt the colour distracted from the story, or were like the people who walked out on Bob Dylan at Newport folk festival for playing an electric guitar, or like those who warned that radio or TV or video games or miniskirts, or hip-hop or selfies or fidget spinners or whatever, would lead to the end of civilisation.
I remember a Daily Mail headline, How using Facebook could raise your risk of cancer, which made things even clearer: To be anti-social, media was to be hysterically on the wrong side of history.
Then I started the research for a book I am writing on how the external world affects our mental health. I wanted to acknowledge the downsides of social media, but to argue that far from being a force for ill, it offers a safe place where the insanities of life elsewhere can be processed and articulated. But the deeper into the research I went, the harder it was to sustain this argument. Besides the Daily Mail screeching about the dangers, other people scientists, psychologists, tech insiders and internet users themselves were highlighting ways in which social media use was damaging health.
Even the internet activist and former Google employee Wael Gonem one of the initiators of the Arab Spring and one-time poster boy for internet-inspired revolution who once saw social media as a social cure now saw it as a negative force. In his eyes it went from being a place for crowdsourcing and sharing, during the initial wave of demonstrations against the Egyptian regime, to a fractious battleground full of echo chambers and hate speech: The same tool that united us to topple dictators eventually tore us apart. Gonem saw social media polarising people into angry opposing camps army supporters and Islamists leaving centrists such as himself stuck in the middle, powerless.
And this isnt just politics. Its health too. A survey conducted by the Royal Society of Public Health asked 1,500 young people to keep track of their moods while on the five most popular social media sites. Instagram and Snapchat came out worst, often inspiring feelings of inadequacy, anxiety and self-loathing. And according to another survey carried out by the youth charity Plan International UK, half of girls and two-fifths of boys have been the victims of online bullying.
The evidence is growing that social media can be a health risk, particularly for young people who now have all the normal pressures of youth (fitting in, looking good, being popular) being exploited by the multibillion-dollar companies that own the platforms they spend much of their lives on.
Kurt Vonnegut said: We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful who we pretend to be. This seems especially true now that we have reached a new stage of marketing where we are not just consumers, but also the thing consumed. If you have friends you only ever talk to on Facebook, your entire relationship with them is framed by commerce. When we willingly choose to become unpaid content providers, we commercialise ourselves. And we are encouraged to be obsessed with numbers (of followers, messages, comments, retweets, favourites), as if operating in a kind of friend economy, an emotional stock market where the stock is ourselves and where we are encouraged to weigh our worth against others.
Of course, humans comparing themselves to others isnt new. But when the others are every human on the internet, people end up comparing themselves their looks, their relationships, their wealth, their lives to the carefully filtered lives of people they would never meet in the real world and feeling inadequate.
Abuse is another serious issue. In his devastating account of online entrepreneurs and their values, Move Fast and Break Things, Jonathan Taplin talks of social medias Colosseum culture of throwing people to the lions. Punishing strangers ought to be a risky endeavour, he writes. But the anonymity of the internet shields the person who punishes the stranger.
Reading first-hand accounts by people with bulimia and anorexia who are convinced that social media exacerbated or even triggered their illnesses, I began to realise something: This situation is not the equivalent of Bob Dylans electric guitar. It is closer to the tobacco or fast-food industries, where vested interests deny the existence of blatant problems that were not there before.
To ignore it, to let companies shape and exploit and steal our lives, would be the ultra-conservative option. The one that says free markets have their own morality. The one that is fine entrusting our future collective health to tech billionaires. The one that believes, totally, in free will; and that mental health problems are either not significant, or are entirely of the individuals making.
We are traditionally far better at realising risks to physical health than to mental health, even when they are interrelated. If we can accept that our physical health can be shaped by society by secondhand smoke or a bad diet then we must accept that our mental health can be too. And as our social spaces increasingly become digital spaces, we need to look seriously and urgently at how these new, business-owned societies are affecting our minds. We must try to see how the rising mental health crisis may be related to the way people are living and interacting. According to a recent survey of almost 1,500 teens and young adults by the Royal Society for Public Health and the Young Health Movement (YHM) in the UK, Instagram is the most damaging social media platform on mental health. The image-sharing platform causes high levels of anxiety and depression. Sometimes, all you do is see people, who may not even be your friends, on holiday or enjoying nights out.
The writer is a novelist
They can make you feel like you are missing out, or not doing enough with your life. These feelings promote a compare and despair attitude, where we look at what someone else has and wonder why we cant be the same. I have to force myself not to look at Instagram or Facebook first thing in the morning, because it usually sets the tone of my day. While I am getting out of bed to go to my day job, influencer Karen is jetting off to London to enjoy a dinner hosted by a famous candle company. It gets to you after a while. You realise that you hair isnt perfect and your outfit is average and then youre unhappy.
Social media was created to be a positive outlet. A platform for people to express themselves. It has now become an avenue of negativity. If any celebrity, athlete or political party sends out a tweet that the public doesnt agree with, they can be taken down with a viciously overwhelming injection of cyberbullying. If you dont have thick skin, you can easily change who you are and what you stand for, for fear of being criticised by your followers. I sometimes think twice about the photos I post online. I wonder if Im too narcissistic ... posting yet another photo of myself having a great time with my friends. I wonder if people critique me for enjoying my life a bit too much.
In an offline world, social communities tend to follow and practise the norms of privacy. You dont have to share your birthday, address or marital status with the people in your neighbourhood. They dont need to know your likes and your dislikes and what your breakfast looked like. But when youre online, if you want to join a social networking site, you have to disclose your personal information in order to be accepted. Once you become an active member of the site, they delve into who you are and what you like. They find out about your habits, your browsing history, where you like to go, what you like to eat and who you interact with the most. You get unsolicited messages from strangers and pokes from long lost acquaintances. In what real life world is poking someone okay? Its not. But its just online. You dont really feel it.
Some young people have never known a world without social media. Around 91 per cent of 16-24 year olds use the internet for social networking. They use social media now more than ever before. They give away information without thinking or knowing the consequences. They get sucked into a world of online games and dangerous online trends. There have even been cases where suicide games were trending online, that children all encouraged each other to participate in. It can be a dark and unpredictable place.
Although most of us know all these things, we decide that we dont want to give up on social media after all. We dont want to be gripped by Fomo, Fear of missing out. We scroll through perfectly curated Instagram posts capturing peoples happy moments, and we ask ourselves why we arent as happy or fulfilled.
Facebooks Mark Zuckerberg says that by giving people the power to share, were making the world more transparent. But what we really need to do is make social media transparent.
Of course, we wont stop using it I certainly wont but precisely for that reason we need to know more about what it is doing to us. To our politics, to our health, to the future generation, and to the world around us. We need to ensure we are still the ones using the technology and that the technology isnt using us.
