Ms. X* glances at her incoming text messages trying not to look distracted while she shares her story. The TWU alumna has two cell phones, four email addresses, and accounts with Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. She has received more than 740 DMs (direct messages) on her Twitter account and has “tweeted” over 3670 times.
Tweeting daily about everything from her lunch choices, concerts, and evening activities to mundane work experiences, she maintains a loyal following by updating content frequently and responding to devotees’ updates. She has over 350 friends on Facebook and has been known to update her status hourly. Sleeping with her mobile device of choice, she is ready for any notification, and admits to waking up to “tweets” even before her alarm rings.
Social media like Facebook and Twitter are fundamentally changing how we communicate and could also be subtly changing our behaviour. Devices for communication have steadily morphed since the early petroglyphs, the sealed message delivered on horseback, carrier pigeons, the stamped letter, the telegram, the fax, and even the email message. Now, with the aid of text messaging such as SMS, EMS, MMS, Tweets, and other tools of social media, we are able to instantly communicate with each other. But is this a good thing? Is all this stimulation and instant response satisfying our needs or is it creating anxiety and addiction? Is this desire for connection spotlighting a deeper need — an insatiable longing for belonging? Are we becoming lonelier in the process?
Although TWU Associate Professor of Philosophy, Robert Doede, Ph.D., has a cell phone, he doesn’t know how to work it all that well, and struggles to remember his own number. A proponent of being off the grid as much as possible, he has a deep respect for the power technology can have over its user. He says, “Any technology does something for us but it also does something to us. Often what it does for us is the most apparent and obvious. But what it does to us is covert, insidious, and easy to ignore.”
One can’t ignore the explosion of social media networking sites. The ability to connect to these sites with portable devices like iPhones and Blackberries makes it possible to be on the grid 100 per cent of the time. Today you can be vacationing with your family or sharing a meal and at the same time be sharing every sight-see and swallow with the “Twitterverse.”
"Any technology does something for us but it also does something to us. Often what it does for us is the most apparent and obvious. But what it does to us is covert, insidious, and easy to ignore." TWU Associate Professor of Philosophy, Robert Doede, Ph.D.
Social media users today are drawn to two sites in particular: Twitter and Facebook. Twitter entices its users by merely asking, “What are you doing?” Users must then “tweet” their response in no more than 140 characters. Facebook, on the other hand, is a gigantic, ever-evolving, moving, breathing, and living yearbook, phonebook, and photo album rolled into one technological entity. While these two sites are popular with social media users now, new sites will continually emerge, keeping up to the demand set by early adopters.
But what motivates us to want to share our intimate experiences with the entire world? Author Hal Niedzviecki, in his book titled, The Peep Diaries, explains the reasons for the popularity of social media and why our desire to “peep” into each other’s lives is so strong. He writes, “From all these overlapping studies and theories we can conclude the following: there are two prevailing interconnected reasons why individuals do peep. There’s the seemingly virtuous search for connection and shared meaning, and the more vicious, pop-fueled desire for attention and recognition.”
TWU Associate Professor of Psychology, Phillip Laird, Ph.D., echoes this notion. “Why do we need to be known? It’s for a sense of personal validation. People need to feel that their life has meaning. Having a site where they can project that to others and receive validation from others’ comments helps accomplish that.”
The problem Laird sees with technology is that, “It is not neutral, it creates. It changes business practices and as a result, it changes us. There is a reciprocally deterministic relationship between the two.”
For Doede, the danger of technology is more than the way it changes us, but the way it changes us without our really knowing.
Ms. X is an outgoing, poised, and confident woman. But beneath this exterior, she struggles with social media addiction. She says, “It started out as fun but now it feels a bit scary. I feel controlled and addicted to it, but I don’t know how to stop. I have a busy family and social life, and a solid and engaging career, but I’m driven to engage and connect with others on these sites constantly. I ask myself why I need this, and I don’t have answers.” When she does unplug, she admits to experiencing peace yet craves the stimulation that goes with being “plugged” in. “When I turn my cell phone back on, I have to know what I missed. It’s obsessive. I can admit that, but I like it.”
Each spring semester, Doede puts social media, or media addiction for that matter, to the test. For a five per cent bonus, his Philosophy 210 students can participate in a media fast for the entire semester. Their challenge? To abstain from all social and traditional media throughout the three-month semester and journal about their experiences. Only the strong succeed, giving up things like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, video games, television, and movies. Doede says that out of a typical class of 35, only about 12 seek the challenge, and by the end of the semester only four to six are still standing.
Hannah Jenkins, a 21-year-old English and communications double major, took Doede up on his challenge. Like her peers, she was a big user of Facebook. When asked about the potential of a media fast, Jenkins says, “I really wanted to do it. I had my own feelings about Facebook, including some negative things, especially when seeing how much time it was taking up. I’d log-on with the intention of writing one message but then end up looking at other people’s pages and before long rabbit trailing.”
In one of her journal entries she writes, “Facebook and meaningless television (which is not all television) owe a huge percentage of their success to people being dissatisfied with their lives. In our modern brilliance, we have invented ways to avoid our shortcomings instead of looking them in the eye and overcoming them. Screens offer an escape from reality but for so many people they become the reality, and the inadequacies from which they were trying to escape simply mount higher.”
Doede says that students partaking in the fast share in their journals that, as they abstain from media, their anxiety decreases, they have more time, their shopping habits change, they lose weight, and their grade point average often improves.
The correlation between attention and anxiety is where Doede sees just how these sites are damaging. “Attention is something that diminishes as technologies place more demands on our time in terms of information access. Our media culture exposes us to an over-abundance of information. We have so much we can’t attentively linger on anything or carefully access anything for long without feeling like we are losing out on something else,” says Doede. “This incessant sense of always being behind on the available data creates a subtle yet pervasive anxiety, tempting us to become rapid-fire and machine-like in as many domains of our life as possible.”
"The deepest loneliness is a loneliness that is unaware of itself — it has become satisfied with a thin degree of communion." TWU Associate Professor of Philosophy, Robert Doede, Ph.D.
In addition to creating anxiety, these sites may actually add to the loneliness they seem designed to alleviate. Doede explains, “For people who are addicted to this level of superficial connection, they intensify their loneliness because it’s never enough. The deepest loneliness is a loneliness that is unaware of itself — it has become satisfied with a thin degree of communion.”
When asked if social media makes her lonelier, Ms. X pauses. “I don’t think I’m lonely. Maybe on some level, the more attention I receive the more I crave. I know when I don’t receive attention, I get anxious. Maybe there is an element of loneliness to that or something deeper.”
Doede predicts that social networking sites will become more sophisticated and morph into new forms of social mediation that will entice us to keep up with their increasingly inhumane pace.
Since her media fast, Jenkins has made major changes to how she uses her account on Facebook. Today she doesn’t have a “wall,” she has privacy settings that allow only her friends to view her photos, and she has deleted over 400 peripheral “friends,” opting to keep only those friends with whom she has meaningful relationships. Her three-month abstinence from Facebook produced a less stressful life and she ended up reading more instead of surfing aimlessly on the site.
Ms. X continues to update and tweet but says, “I have to make changes soon. I feel like I’m on a collision course. I keep asking whether this is how I want to spend my free time. I am feeling more convicted to choose to spend it with real people in the physical world instead of having relationships with…text, really.”
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by Erin Mussolum '95
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