What motivates our use of social media?
Across the world, the World Health Organisation have reported that the average person spends 144 minutes per day on social media. Rather than provoking shock, the figures have been met with indifference by a world that has grown accustomed to indulging the desire for temporary escape. A society that willingly whittles away six years and 8 months of its total lifespan without asking the simple question of ‘why?’
My Generation Z peers, and I, have heard the arguments and seen all the stats that are designed to deter our use of social media. Constantly, we are lectured about the damage to our confidence, self-esteem and ability to make meaningful connections not to mention the adverse impact on our time.
Yet, we still persist.
This leads me to conclude that we still haven’t nailed the conversation around either the negative repercussions of social media nor the motivations which explains its use.
Interestingly, our motivation for using social media is a question that very few consider. As a result, I doubt that there many Gen Z’s who would be able to come up with an answer which wouldn’t make them cringe or sound shallow.
Being Gen Z and living in a largely prosperous society, I have not known any other world except the one in which social media exists. The brooding social critic David Foster Wallace articulated this in his ‘This is Water’ speech in 2005 through the parable of the swimming fish. In it, two younger fish pass an older fish who greets them saying ‘morning boys, how’s the water?’ The two young fish continue swimming for a while before one of them turns around and asks, ‘what the hell is water?’
When an activity has become so entrenched in our conception of reality it is difficult to detach ourselves so as to look it objectively. In mainstream society, we apply the logic of the herd which means we consistently fail to interrogate our motivations behind using social media. As such, our silent acquiescence acts as an assurance that we should not be concerned that the average Australian spends 2 hours and 16 minutes on social media.
In putting the question surrounding our motivations to a friend, the instant response was ‘release’ from everyday life. The honesty of this person highlights the reality that there are no grand motivations behind our use of social media. I would argue that this answer is the general, albeit unspoken, consensus amongst most people, particularly in my Gen Z age bracket.
Excluding communication focussed apps such as Snapchat and Facebook Messenger, platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and TokTok were conceived to entertain. The brief moment of escape that social media provides, acts like a shield that we depend upon to protect us from a disquieting reality. This being that we honestly don’t know what we would do with the 2hrs and 16 minutes of our day if it wasn’t on our phones.
Social media has conditioned us to fear the silence and stillness of our own minds. It feeds our anxieties surrounding the perceived ordinariness of our lives encouraging us to compare ourselves and obsess over friend, stranger as well as celebrity.
Silence, without TikTok to distract us, means reflection and thinking which is not only hard but intimidating. The muscle in our brain that was previously able to cope with silence has atrophied in our content-saturated lives. In its place the section of our brain that craves instant gratification has been stimulated by the illusion of purpose temporarily offered by social media.
When scrolling through Facebook or Instagram it feels as though we are being hypnotised. Of course, the comprehension that we have been hypnotised by something on our screen only becomes reality for us when we look at the clock. The subsequent sigh of disappointment at the wasted time is a familiar experience that requires no elaboration. As a result of our addiction to social media our thumbs have become like Catalonian separatists imbued with an autonomy that allows them to keep scrolling without the authority of our brain.
Next time you are with a friend watch as they transition between the various apps on their device. Observe that they will have a particular order, which has become like a reflex, of the sites which they look at. Often, the time they remain on the app itself will not be long enough to see any content. It is almost as if they are responding to a tic, an irresistible impulse which cannot be ignored.
When we use social media most of us are not conscious of what we are actually doing. Consuming huge servings of information we hardly chew the content that we interact with, preferring to be controlled by our feelings rather than our thoughts.
Ultimately, the most memorable and effective lessons we learn as individuals are the ones we learn ourselves. With this considered, I am not commanding that anyone abandon social media because we spend ‘x’ amount of time on it as a society. What I am asking is that when you are next on social media that you avoid becoming hypnotised. That, with every picture, video or post, you remain conscious as opposed to the semi-comatose trance we often find ourselves in.
In doing so, you will be able to analyse, on a personal level, with greater objectivity, the motivations behind the time that you dedicate to social media.
