When we told people that we were doing a week without social media, the most common response was ‘Oh I’ve really wanted to try that, but I could never manage it!’. In an age where we rely so heavily on social media, we wondered how easy it would be to remove ourselves from the doom-scrolling, endless content and pressure to keep in touch with everyone. With only WhatsApp and iMessage on hand, we entered a fresh, digital-free life!
Initially, we found ourselves being extremely productive and began pursuing other hobbies. In the five to ten-minute breaks between everyday tasks, instead of scrolling, we completed necessary chores like washing our dishes or tidying our bedrooms. We also suddenly began using our phones purposefully, restarting Spanish on Duolingo and checking the daily news headlines! Beyond screen time, we were encouraged to find other activities, like crafting (embroidery is incredibly stress relieving!) or arranging catch-ups with friends we had not seen for a while. There remained a definite temptation to check social media, but our commitment to this article made it much easier to abstain where we would usually have given in.
As sociology students, one aspect of our social media cleanse that we found particularly interesting was realising how much of our modern lives are dictated by our online identities. Goffman (1956) classically spoke about a dramaturgical model of individuals having a ‘performed self’, with a ‘stage identity’ exposed to the world, alongside a ‘backstage identity’ that we choose not to present. Through the week, it became apparent how heavily we utilise social media as a tool for performing the ‘self’. For us, it was refreshing to regain freedom in constructing our identities as opposed to letting a 2D digital page do it for us.
I [Jayni] spent most of my weekend visiting my friends in Newcastle, whilst I [Harriet] visited the Saturday markets, did some charity shopping and destroyed my bank account celebrating St Patrick’s Day! We often would have shared some of those moments on our Instagram stories or updated our group chats. However, being unable to update made us consider why posting had ever become such a priority in people’s lives.
However, as the week wore on, we began to see the struggle of being completely off social media. On multiple occasions, friends tried to contact us via Snapchat group chats (for example, to meet up before the Politics ball or send links to potential second-year flats) and often, we were only informed about it hours later by friends who had our phone numbers. Mediums like Snapchat and Instagram do seem to be people’s primary mode of communication, and this is especially helpful when you want to contact people you are not necessarily close enough to give your phone number to! Even University societies communicate all important information on Instagram, so we struggled with keeping up to date.
The benefit of solely using messaging apps was that the conversations we had were more meaningful than the dreaded blank face snap. Texts were generally exchanged to facilitate meeting up or receiving life updates from friends, and we were more engaged with the conversation. However, maybe we should not be so quick to discount meaningless face snaps and snappy DM’s. Within our university lives, it’s increasingly difficult to keep up with all of our friends over text, and for people we are less close to, snap-chatting provides a way of keeping in contact with people whom we did not interact with over our social media break – we just had to hope that they would still respond after a week of thinking we had left them on delivered! It is almost impossible to completely remove social media from modern lifestyles, but reducing our overall screen time is a simple solution. Maybe the best option is to make social media just that- social! Instead of endless scrolling, we can use it to communicate with others and establish connections. With 67% of adolescents reporting feeling worse about their own lives as a result of their social media use, it seems like an overtly positive lifestyle change with little cons. Overall, we are championing the social media cleanse to all!
Referenced: ‘The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life’ by Erving Goffman (1956).
“Social Media logos displayed on a laptop” by curemedia is licensed under CC BY 2.0.