Social media make us less human

Home Opinion Social media make us less human

On Oct. 10, 2014, I mercifully deactivated the poor, neglected entity that was once my Facebook account. I terminated a long-abandoned Twitter profile, and even made a new, disposable email account for a fresh Spotify profile that is unlinked to any of my previous media profiles. While most of the modern world is becoming further woven together, I am slipping further off the grid.

We live in an era when stimulation is literally at our fingertips: Instantaneous, painless, and cheap. From 2005 to 2013, social media usage increased an astounding 800 percent, with 73 percent of online adults in 2013 using at least one social networking site, according to a 2013 report of the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project. Social media is no longer a gimmick or a fad. The race to develop the next trendy network has led to the creation of more and more media to plug into. In seconds, we can engorge our minds with piles and piles of information. Like vultures circling through the pixels of illuminated screens, we flock to the smallest snippets of self-published thought and suck them dry.

Modern social networks are an unrelenting, never-ending source of instant gratification that have completely changed the way human beings live. Never before have we been able to sift through another’s personality so impersonally. Anyone with a few fingers and half a brain is happy to read your spews of thought as long as you will glance at theirs. We don’t always know what a person is thinking, but we know what someone is thinking because it just disappeared at the top of the screen a few blinks ago. Our minds are wired to an ever-expanding nebula that can temporarily eliminate a vague desire to be connected.

Now that we have the unprecedented ability to convey our thoughts effortlessly, our communication lines are clogged with information that is quickly chewed, digested, and forgotten. The thirst to stay constantly involved and relevant cannot be a healthy step for mankind. The time we spend plugged in is time lost to a perpetual cycle of remaining in the know. Instantaneous communication has turned us into mindless locusts with a taste for the irrelevant, the unnecessary, and the immediate: an insatiable appetite for that which cannot fulfill us.

In an age when we can saturate our minds with endless textual bile, how can we retain the elements of who we are as individuals? A healthy amount of mental solitude is fundamental to the development of who we are, and I fear that social media has hunted the concepts of personal reflection and deep thinking to near extinction. The overabundance of communication in our generation has effectively shaken awake our daydreams, crippled our fictional alter-egos, and saddled our minds with leaden irrelevance. There is no time to truly think. No time to dream. We seem to be shackled by a socially-constructed obligation to stay hooked into each other’s heads at all times.

I’m not suggesting that social media is demon spawn or that each of us should completely retreat into our own thoughts. Far from it. But we need to be careful not to let social media destroy the much more fulfilling stimulations in this life. Instead of using our downtime to ooze through Facebook, Twitter, and Yik-Yak, we should find something a little more real. Recently, I issued a challenge to myself that I think is refreshing in an age of digital monotony, and I would like to pass it along: Find something to struggle with. For me, it’s learning to play guitar. But it can be anything, as long as it forces your mind to be engaged. Something that requires headaches, sweat, and maybe even blood. Something you can wrestle with for hours and hours and never be truly sick of in your heart, even after lethargy tries to trick you into admitting it isn’t worth your time. Something you love for its own sake and because there is joy in actively thinking or doing or being something or some way. Find what this means to you, and then make it conform to your efforts.

Our connected culture is packed full of voices and distractions that can mask who we truly are and deafen our ears to what is truly important. But when there is so much more that we can be, we owe it to unplug, take a few deep breaths, and discover who we really are.