Closeness or Connection? Why Social Media Is More Isolating Than Ever

Megan Hayes | Opinion Editor

Smart phone social media usage. / Photo by 'Rawpixel', licensed by Envato.com.

I've recently went off of social media, and I'm noticing a handful of changes. I'm not going to lie, I've been influenced by YouTubers going "analog", and it has solidified the maladaptive daydream in my head that going off of social media will fix all of my problems. I feel like many people in our generation have a love-hate relationship with social media, and I think that many of us tend to lean in to "vintage" clothes or items to have some sort of connection to what life used to be like. I'll come out and say it: I wish I was born in the 80's or 90's. I wish that I had a Sony walkman instead of a smartphone, connected to me by the hip. I wish I was able to read books with an attention span that hasn't been severely edited by short-form content. I wish I rode a bike instead of driving anywhere and everywhere in my car, actually being able to get some nice exercise as a part of my day instead of it feeling like a task that's held as a torture method above my head. I'm so damn sick of social media! I'm so sick of everyone having access to me all the time, the short-form content of Italian brain rot and AI fruit "love island" slop melting my brain. So let's talk about it.

Why do you keep talking about short form content, you ask? It messes with the contents of your brain, literally. We have reward and pleasure chemicals that are affected and released when we finish a task -- mainly dopamine. From my understanding, dopamine, or the "happy hormone" is released when we complete something, like finishing a homework assignment, finishing a chore, etc. We get rewarded by a "reward prediction" center in our brain for when we finish something, to motivate us to do more. It feels good to finish a task! But, when we are able to finish a lot of mini "tasks" on social media, like finishing a video... or video, after video, after video... it hacks the dopamine production in our brain to an endless release of this happy hormone. It feels good to scroll. And this is the problem. It feels so good to scroll through these short videos that we just keep doing it, over and over again until we don't want to do anything else BUT scroll. That's why you may find yourself "doomscrolling", the phenomenon where you want to stop scrolling but end up scrolling for hours and hours instead, relatively uncontrollably.

It's not our fault that we have this relationship with social media, though. Instagram, for example, used to have an "end". When we used to scroll on Instagram in the early days of it being invented, we used to scroll until we saw all the pictures, and then there was nothing more to scroll to. It ended. And then you closed the app. However, when the creators of these social media platforms discovered that people were closing the app after they had seen all the content, there was a very quick uprising of more content, also known as the "endless scroll". There is no longer an end to your social media feed. It is a continuous loop of never ending content which will keep coming for as long as you can keep up with scrolling through it. A huge culprit of the "endless scroll" is TikTok, where the algorithm gives you never-ending content in order to keep you hooked. This is what feeds social media addiction. Several lawsuits are being filed against Meta, Instagram and Facebook's parent company, for social media addiction not because of the fault of the individual using the app but from the overall design of the platform to be addicting and purposely farm engagement as a form of income.

Many of you have been forced to watch "The Social Network", which is a documentary that they typically show in late high school to early college as a last-ditch effort to snap you out of the addiction that is growing in our generation, which is somewhat out of our control. Why is it out of our control? Social media, especially Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok, have become a commonplace mode of communication for our generation, Generation Z, that you are looked at as quite strange if you tell people you don't have an account or indulge in this method of communication. Although, I'd like to argue that these days it is not even a form of communication, but merely a way to tell if people are still "connected" to you or not. It is shocking and sometimes disheartening when someone takes you off or removes you as a follower from their account, leaving you to think of all of the personal reasons that something could have gone wrong. We are so hypersensitive to feeling "connected" to people through these social networking sites that we forget the root of our relationships, which is closeness. It really helps to put it in perspective if you think of all of your followers in one room -- that is often a LOT of people! A lot of these people we don't foster actual bonds with, anyways, it is just a means of having them in our "network". If you had a close and personal relationship with everyone in your following (speaking in typical numbers of college students which I observe, can be anywhere from a hundred to thousands) you'd simply have no time left in your life to do anything else.

So, circling back to short form content with the knowledge that we never truly know the people in our following, what could the harm possibly be? Social media is teaching us that having baseline and surface level connections is what we want, and it gives us a guise of feeling important and needed. Those who come off of social media for detoxes, or even remove it from their lives all together, report feeling more close and having more fulfilling personal connections, as less of their time is spent swiping and scrolling, and more of their time is spent fostering in person connections with people physically in their life, not profiles online. So much of our time on social media, for many users, is spent trying to impress. Another large portion of the time is spent tweaking our profiles to look perfect, so we can compare who's better off. This is coming from a lens of someone who has dealt with social media addiction, has grown up identifying as female, and survived the height of COVID-19 by online connections when the world went dark and there was nothing else to turn to except our smartphones and laptops.

It is so damn difficult trying not to compare yourself to others when the beauty standard has only taught you to do so. Growing up young with family members on Weight Watchers, or buying health scams from infomercials to try to improve their body, and now, having the large presence of models on social media that we do, teaches us especially as women that nothing that we do will be good enough. There is so much to compare to in this world, and it is heartbreaking when we look at the reality young girls and women are facing through social media addiction. So many suicides and instances of self-harm are based off of "never being good enough", or these young girls being exposed to dangerous people through social media that they never would have had access to had they not been exposed to social networking at such a young age. Often times, the parents do not even know that their child is becoming involved in this type of behavior. It is heartbreaking to see how our youth, and the next generation at that, is growing up. Generation Alpha, the newest generation of upcoming young adults and teens, is experiencing an alarming surge in mental health issues, mostly due to exposure to screens and all of the occurrences that come with having unrestricted, or less restricted internet access. One in four to one in five young adults report having mental health issues like depression, anxiety, or ADHD, just to name a few, and these kids, called the "digital natives" are facing the brunt of what humans should not experience -- burnout and constant, 24/7 access to all of the information in the world (Springtide Research Institute).

At the risk of sounding preachy, I want to offer an explanation for my very opinionated experience. Over my several years working with children, I have seen a significant change in the behavior regarding cell phone usage. Children, who were otherwise healthy developmentally, are now unable to go without their phones and resort to sneaking them into either facilities or during the day care, as phones have become their next comfort, their new pacifier. When they should be turning to parents for advice, consolation, and comfort, they are instead turning to their technology to soothe and comfort them. Take it from me... I am uncomfortable when I cannot scroll on my phone. I am sure this is an experience that many of us face... when we are in the elevators going to our dorm, everyone is on their phone. When waiting for your water to boil for your pasta, on the phone. When there is a break in class, on the phone. There is no solace or silence or respite from our technology these days. There is no break. There is no "putting it down", because odds are, after a few minutes and a little notification that sounds like a chirp, you'll be picking that technology right back up.

Connection is more important these days over closeness. In person relationships are becoming less important to our younger generations than they are supposed to be. It is a hard reality to face, but the technology bubble will only pop if we do something about it. These lawsuits against Meta and other larger tech companies responsible for the addiction to technology that can sometimes take one's life is not going to stop anything -- these companies have enough money to pay it off like it is not an issue.

I urge you -- remember how important your life is. Remember how your mother traced the lines in your feet and hands as a baby. Remember how cherished you are. Remember what the grass and the sun feels like outside, and remember what it is like to spend a day with your best friend in the world playing in the river. I beg of you... put your phone down and enjoy the life you have. You only get this chance once.