Rakelle Maurici

I may be a bit late to the party in writing this however the other night I rewatched Netflix’s docudrama The Social Dilemma in a bid to have a better relationship with my phone. Did I really just write that? Aside from it (re)alarming me in disbelief about social listening and tracking user behaviour, I have come away wondering if our behaviour is the problem.

It’s easy to point the finger at Facebook or Instagram for their ‘flawed’ business models however I don’t believe they can be entirely blamed for society’s problems. I’m sure we can all agree that some social media platforms do have their perks. We’ve all shared missing person callouts and organ donation fundraisers, and see them pay off too. Before my nonna got sick and passed away, she told us she wanted to find her last remaining sister who had married an Argentinian man and moved there over 40 years ago. My family was able to track my great aunt down through her grandchildren on Facebook. She was still alive, living in Buenos Aires and no longer spoke Italian. Determined to see her sister for the last time, my nonna took a 10 hour flight to Argentina to debrief over the decades they spent apart. Either that or they argued about who was paying for dinner in broken Italian.

Posts like these are not the problem, targeted ads are not the problem, the way we allow it to infiltrate our reality and contaminate our mental wellbeing is the problem. The kind that robs us of our imagination.

I know both my nonna and her sister would have cherished that moment together because the less we have of something, the higher the value it holds to us. Today, we see snippets of people’s lives at our fingertips, at all hours. Without even having to ask, check-in or catch up, we think we know how another person is doing. Which poses the question, has the accessibility to everything and anything made us ungrateful, focus-lacking narcissists in the process?

It’s very hard to retrain, rewire and reverse our brains to function without something we are indoctrinated to use – I’ve fallen victim to it too. Most days, I put my phone on airplane mode at night; supposedly it makes for better sleep. The smallest creek of the stairs is enough to wake me and send me into an anxious frenzy for the next hour and 43 minutes.

I digress. There are nights when my curious mind wonders and I find myself mindlessly clicking around a forum from 2007. But what am I searching for? A life? I’m not going to find it by discovering the girl who gave me a hard time over my ethnic lunch in school has bought a new car. It’s only when reality kicks in, and Apple alerts me with a screen time update, that I think to myself, what am I gaining from having this at my fingertips, constantly? 

So Why Do We Open These Apps? 

The explore pages of Instagram rarely enlighten me and rarely do I discover something useful there – if I need something I’ll go searching for it. I don’t need to see a wave of birthday or congratulation posts, this only feeds an unhealthy ego. What happened to a good old fashioned text, or better yet, a call? 

There hasn’t been a single time I’ve opened social media and thought, ‘okay, what do the ads have for me today’. If something useful is targeted to me, great, and if not, I’m definitely not searching for it. I’m not in denial that the likes of Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and TikTok don’t play on human vulnerabilities and weaknesses, because they do. Marketable predictions are there for a reason, and I understand that many business models are built on a form of exploitation. But when my wellbeing is spared then that is of no use to me, or any of us. Rather it springboards into a very bad habit that plays over and over. 

Ads might be dehumanising consumer behaviour but that doesn’t mean we too need to lose our human touch in the midst of it. It sparked worry in me that Gen-Z and below are fearful, full of anxiety, and overwhelmed by the world. I can’t imagine a world where going to school involves conversations about how many followers you have on TikTok, it is painful enough being a teen in school where judgements are passed on boob size and whether you started your period yet. The online hate, slandering, and infectiousness of a virtual unreal world has become unimaginable and that is not the kind of world I want to bring my children up in. 

For many years now I have had my social media notifications off. I don’t need to know when someone is going live on Instagram or if someone has requested to follow me right away. Most content creators save insightful videos for us to enjoy and digest at a later date. The overloading of information and news updates keeps me unhealthily glued to my phone. Most recently, I have gone through phases of deleting my Instagram account entirely or removing the app from my phone and the headspace I have felt is phenomenal.

2020 has been a year of immense reflection and after watching The Social Dilemma, I’m done being drunk on dopamine. Without getting too philosophical, when you look at the universe; the stars and the moon, you realise there are far greater things out there than what people do all day. Perhaps it is time to move on and make use of my time that doesn’t involve doom scrolling. 

Which reminds me, does anyone know if the iPhone 12 comes with an offline mode like the 2008 version of MSN?