There seems to be an immediate sight of frustration associated with the prompt to consciously reflect on our digital lives: although we (students) are all constantly online, I don’t know anyone who can say with complete confidence: “I love social media!” Instead, we talk about #doomscrolling and short attention spans and independently all acknowledge our dependence on our own devices.
Many people are frustrated with their own inability to put their mobile phones aside, and above all with this empty feeling that endless scrolling on Instagram and other platforms has only ever filled their lives with meaningless content and wasted time.
But at the same time, I increasingly feel that after such excursions into the vastness of shorts, stories and comment columns, I am confronted with so much content and, above all, opinions, that I often withdraw from the internet feeling anxious, insecure and frustrated – while I switch to the standard browser to google ‘iron deficiency symptoms’.
I should perhaps explain what my feed looks like on the average, well-known platforms – because, as I was recently reminded during the rather rare activity of joint doomscrolling (two people, one mobile phone), our feeds are extremely individual and ‘bubble-based’ 1.
For example, when I open Instagram, the posts mostly range from ‘You need to see Gustaf Westman’s new Ikea collab…’, ‘Hormone disruptors most doctors skip’, ‘4 invisible conflict patterns in relationships’ (figure 1 – 3), advertisements along the lines of ‘Run, don’t walk’ to tackle yet another beauty flaw I was previously unaware of, and reels (i.e. very short videos) where comments on the latest episode of ‘The Summer I Turned Pretty’ are brutally swiped away by other people’s opinions on developments in Gaza or on Charlie Kirk, and all that within 3 minutes.
It is no news that this grotesque, arbitrary stringing together of content does more harm than good to humans and their brains, that the never-ending flow of digital information overwhelms, overstimulates and numbs us, but one fact has only recently become clear to me.
Regardless of the accounts of private individuals and institutions that we generally follow on social networks, the content we encounter while scrolling (for example on YouTube ‘shorts’ or the Instagram ‘Explore Feed’) usually comes from people we don’t know, as they ultimately want to increase their reach.
So I thought about how many people I interact with on an average day, generously counting everything from the train’s ticket inspector, the employee in the Lipsius canteen, my flatmates and text messages from my friends at home. I come up with about 10 to 20 interactions, and a quick search online also somewhat shows that people come into contact with an average of 15 people per day.
But if you scroll through digital platforms such as Instagram, YouTube or X, it is quite possible that you will easily be confronted with the voices, faces, claims and opinions of 20 people in less then 10 minutes.
What’s more, no one really likes unsolicited advice, and yet I often find myself being told ‘you have to try X to achieve Y’ by complete strangers on my screen and, thanks to algorithms, being constantly reminded again and again, that my breakfast in fact seems to lacks micronutrients and my bookshelf feminist literature. Privileged problems, I think to myself as I save another high-protein recipe reel, even though I’ll never look at the folder again. If a stranger in the supermarket pointed out my unhealthy shopping on the conveyor belt, it would probably be extremely irritating, but on the internet, I seem to welcome the criticism. Not to mention that behind every other piece of “well-intentioned digital self-improvement advice” there is product placement.
And that’s the more harmless part, in my opinion.
Beyond Pilates and relationship advice, social networks are also home to political content and debates, sometimes terribly superficial, but also extremely heated, and depending on the platform, filters and algorithms, you can quickly view the opinions of countless people in all sorts of audiovisual formats and especially in comment sections. I wish I could just write that these ‘opportunities for exchange’ are also a blessing of the internet, but ‘freedom of speech’ and digital rules of conduct are probably a topic for another time, and for more than 1000 words.
I would just like to point out that nowadays, in many countries, you don’t have to leave the house to vote, nor do you have to do so to face politically polarising people and content. And while interactions in analogue life usually involve two more or less equally active parties, the digital world is dominated by passive, uncritical consumption.
Of course, the discourse is much more nuanced than can be described here in a few words, but today I wanted to mention the people we encounter online and whom we should perhaps take a little less seriously than our fellow passenger in the four-seater compartment on the train home.
Sources:
Del Valle, Sara & Hyman, James & Hethcote, Herbert & Eubank, SG. (2007). Mixing patterns between age groups in social networks. Social Networks. 29. 539-554.
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Daily-average-number-of-contacts-per-person-in-age-group-j-The-average-number-of_fig2_228649013
Zhaoyang R, Sliwinski MJ, Martire LM, Smyth JM. Age differences in adults’ daily social interactions: An ecological momentary assessment study. Psychol Aging. 2018 Jun;33(4):607-618. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6113687
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