I was scrolling through Facebook and came across this article that one of my Facebook friends shared. In her caption, she explained that she had recently deleted Snapchat and Instagram off her phone and that this article did a pretty good job explaining why she did so--and also why she is not re-downloading them. Her post got a good number of likes and a few comments agreeing with her.
Here is the link: http://www.tjmousetis.com/blog/2016/3/14/stop-looking-at-emotional-porn
*Warning: this article has religious (specifically Christian) undertones because it was written by a Christian blogger but the general idea the author makes about social media was interesting. The main premise is that social media is akin to "emotional porn" in the sense that using social media is addicting and harmful for your mental/emotional health, leading to frustrations and other issues later on. The author summed it up by saying, "Emotional porn is looking at something that isn't a reality and being frustrated that it isn't your reality." One example of "emotional porn" that was used in the article was "following your frenemies and saying you don't care what they are doing, yet all the while you know every thing about every single aspect of their lives," which I am definitely guilty of. With that example, I understood what the author meant because when I participated in this activity, it caused a lot of emotional stress and wasted a good amount of time.
I think this was a good example of some of the problems that have come up recently with the rise of internet and social media use that were mentioned in some of our past readings and discussions. Although not everyone struggles with these problems, I can say that both my close friends and I have dealt with some form of obsession over social media, whether that was spending too much time on it or over-analyzing other people's posts. So a little detox could be good for everyone because it could create time for more productive things.
I think it's really interesting that you mentioned that you have spent too much time on social media and over analyzed other people's posts, because I feel like even without social media, people like to analyze their friends' body language and speech patterns, and gossip about what has happened to people they love to hate. We constantly fantasize about false realities. I definitely know that even in person, my best friend and I love to complain and fixate on something people do as a way to vent. And how many people repeat in their heads over and over something their date may have said the other night? I think that we like to blame technology for our millennial tendencies, but to be honest, it only amplifies what was always there by making it more visible. Would we really be more productive and healthy without technology? I doubt I would be. I love procrastinating, with or without technology :) I'm also interested in perhaps looking at the other side of technology, and ways that it may have made us healthier. Maybe people who would have already been unhealthy seek out unhealthy behaviors on technology.
ReplyDelete