Is Social Media Ruining Your Social Life?

There is a life beyond screens. Make sure you ‘like’ it.

- Ritu Ailani

Let them know we smile, we laugh, we love our life. We love our life. We love our life. We love our likes, our comments, our common interests being that we like being liked.” A Chicago-based performing arts student Shea Glover recited these lines in her spoken word poem Social Media. Her video struck a chord with thousands of people on YouTube. They said her words were ‘powerful’ and ‘poignant’, before going back to scroll through their Instagram feeds.

Perhaps that’s why she ends the piece the way she did: Hearing her phone beep, she hurriedly picks it up to check her latest notifications. You wait for her to put it down and finish what she had to say, but she never does. You spend the next minute watching her slip into a rabbit hole of likes, comments and shares, before realising you’re in one yourself. That’s how most conversations are these days. And, somehow, we’ve accepted this matrix as a way of life.

A similar thing happened when The Social Dilemma released on Netflix. The documentary revealed the shocking game plan of tech giants who deploy billions of dollars to use human psychology against us, and keep people hooked to their apps like puppets on a string. The developers roped in for the film confessed that they knew all along the repercussions of this technology on human relationships. They highlighted that the rate at which youngsters these days are obtaining driving licences or going out on real dates is substantially lower compared to the previous generation, because they don’t know a life outside their 4x4-inch screens. Ironically enough, when that cat was let out of the bag, audiences took to social media to debate and discuss the issue.