Social media: it’s not me, it’s you
I have this message for people who find my refusal to use social media inconvenient:
Too bad.
Social media is at best a waste of time and, at worst, dangerous. These days, nobody even contests the fact that it can damage the mental health of certain groups of people – particularly the young. That otherwise sensible people are being sucked into wasting hours every day clicking and scrolling seems, again, hardly a matter of dispute.
Alongside the hazards that social media creates simply by being what it is are more insidious dangers created by its implementation. A small group of mega-corporations controls all the popular social media platforms. By offering the illusion of free services, these corporations monetize our personal data and habits, violating everybody’s privacy. I concede that, if you haven’t spent your entire working life in the computing industry, you might not be well-placed to appreciate these technological risks. Even those of us who have spent a lifetime in IT probably don’t understand all of them. The full horrors may yet to be revealed. Still, the more obvious, psychological risks should be sufficient discouragement from using social media, even for non-technologists.
I have to concede that I find it hard to disentangle my distaste for social media from my dislike of smartphones: they do tend to go together. Both smartphones and social media are innovations that had the potential to be powerful forces for good but, in reality, have become tools of exploitation.
I’m aware that some people get a benefit from social media, and are either willing to accept the risks, or don’t know (or care) what they are. Fair enough: it’s not my place to tell you what to do. I can’t stop you smoking four packs of cigarettes a day either, although I’d certainly advise against it.
Nevertheless, I can’t be entirely neutral on this subject. In principle, it’s not my problem if you’re willing to be force-fed misinformation by crackpots, and have your privacy violated by the mega-corps; but it is my problem when social media edges out all other forms of communication.
If my unwillingness to use it excludes me from real-world social events, that’s unfortunate; but, frankly, people who are in thrall to their smartphones make poor company anyway. But it’s starting to exclude me from charitable and community efforts too, and that’s not OK. A number of charities for which I used to volunteer no longer ask for my services, because they don’t have a way to communicate except Facebook and the like. Their administrators all have my telephone number and my email address. If all else fails, they know where I live. And, yet, it seems that if they can’t reach me using a smartphone app, they won’t bother.
If you don’t want me at your party enough even to send me a text message, fair enough. But if you need somebody with a four-wheel-drive truck to pull an ambulance out of a ditch in the snow – something I’ve done before – and you’re not willing to pick up the telephone, that’s on you. If you need me to stand on a traffic island all day, directing participants to your charity event – again, something I’ve done before – and you can’t even send me an email: sorry. You’ll have to ask somebody else. Charity administrators have told me in the past that they struggle to find volunteers to support their work; and, yet, they’ve put themselves out of contact with people like me who have a history of working with them, because I don’t use social media.
So, while using social media to make small talk seems harmless enough to me (even though I’ve no interest in joining in) letting charities and community organizations become reliant on it seems rather self-destructive.
While apologists for social media tell us that 64% of the world’s population use it, it seems odd to exclude the 36% that do not. That’s still an awful lot of people: billions, in fact. Moreover, if you’re a charitable organization, you’re probably going to get better support from people who don’t feel they need to spend three hours every day fondling a screen.
While we often think of social media dependence as a problem for the young, I’m relieved to find that a small, but growing, population of teenagers is limiting or abandoning it. Instead, it appears that people in the 30-50 age group are increasingly getting drawn in. Perhaps younger people have already learned how social media trashes their real-life social lives, while those of us who are middle-aged still have that unhappy learning experience ahead of us. I suspect it’s mostly the 30-50 group who are running charities and community organizations, and its their increasing social media addiction that’s causing the communication problem.
And that brings me to the title of this little rant: if you can’t contact me because I don’t use social media, I regard that as your fault for allowing yourself to become dependent on it, not my fault for avoiding it. I’m not going to change.
