Miriam Rodero: Anti-social media

It’s the first thing we do in the morning and the last thing we do at night. It has become an integral part of our daily lives and something which we can no longer live without. Without doing it we feel lost, disorientated, maybe even a little bit panicked. It is our means of remaining linked to the rest of humanity; of finding our own permanent sense of involvement in the world. I am, of course, talking about the routine scroll through the various social media apps that now dictate our lives: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Yik Yak, Snapchat…

Our addiction to this virtual world is nothing new to us. We have come to accept it as part of who we are. We are the society who cannot have their phones out of sight for one second. The society always ready to transition from the material moment into the constantly updating online world at the mere sound of a “notification”. If anybody questions or mocks this mode of living, our answer is obvious and clear: it is our way of staying connected. We are constantly accessible to others, just like they are constantly accessible to us.

Of course, the widespread use of social media has facilitated the way we maintain relationships: through these networking sites, we can effortlessly share the minutiae of our everyday lives with friends and families living miles away. But what happens when sharing these moments becomes addictive; when our experiences only appear to be validated through social media? Because it has almost come to seem that if we don’t Instagram a photo of the meal we just had, we didn’t have it. If we don’t Tweet in the club we were at last night, we weren’t there. Wasn’t on your Snapchat story? Then sorry, it didn’t happen!

Through social networking, we create a more artificial, polished and perfected version of our lives. Sites such as Instagram demonstrate the need to alter and transform moments through photo-editing to make them all the more appealing. And for what? To give others envy; to make them see what they are missing out on.

Because it’s all great when you’re part of the fun. But this dependence on having to know what everyone else is doing all the time becomes quite isolating. Through Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram etc., we are relentlessly reminded of what we are not doing, where we are not, who we are not with. Ironically, by remaining constantly connected to the rest of the world via social media, we feel detached. Doesn’t matter if we initially wanted to stay in – seeing everyone else’s photos, videos, status updates brings on a soul destroying bout of FOMO (“Fear Of Missing Out” for those of you unfamiliar with the term).

And yet somehow we have become addicted to this feeling of exclusion. We all know those moments, when you’re with a group of friends and the conversation has slowly died down. You look around and suddenly realise that everybody, including yourself, is on their phone, mechanically swiping down as they scroll through every social networking site available to check what is happening elsewhere. Apart from the fact that this habit is just plain rude, what is perhaps more worrying is that it has almost become involuntary. Taken in by the urgent necessity to know what the rest of the world is doing means we have forgotten how to live in the moment – the moment we are actually part of.

So maybe it’s time we put our phones away next time we’re at the pub with our friends. Or refrain from taking a Snapchat video next time we’re at a club. Or just eat that plate of food before Instagraming a photo of it, no matter how appetizing or gourmet it may look. Because although FOMO may just seem like a silly acronym, our fear of missing out should be very real. But not of missing out on the experiences of others; of missing out on our own lives.