Dear Editor,
I am writing in response to the article entitled, “Social media — a toxic companion”, specifically the idea of social media being a tool of disconnection. I concur with this notion. It is a common phenomenon that social media sinks poison into the personal relationship and external relationships of young people by inducing them to expose themselves to the dangerous world of the internet.
In terms of personal relationships, social media drives people away by rendering real life interactions meaningless. With social media, you no longer have to clock up on how others are feeling and you do not have to reach out to your friends when you are depressed and lonely. You can simply express all your negativity with an Instagram story or a tweet and you feel relieved as if you have told your truth regardless of the audience. In such an age when young people are often stuck in a wide range of frustration, this practice is not only ineffective but also detrimental. Young teenagers neglect the importance of the listeners and fallaciously assume that they only need a platform to pour their emotions out. What humans truly need is actual companionship and complaining on social media is like yelling into an abyss that makes you devoid of response and care. “At the end, teens never realise that a single black photo with depressing caption will not fulfil their needs to be heard and they further internalise their struggles instead of reaching out to their surroundings. They tend to bottle up their emotions in real life to the brink of breakdown that leads to irreversible damage on themselves and their relationships. Connection requires communication and communication requires a person to tell and a person to listen. At the end of the day, teenagers never learn how to tell their stories and how to listen to others. This hampers the emotional development of individuals and community.
What is worse is that social media sets a wall between everyone. This can be understood in two ways, the content creators and the content receivers. As users of social media, we want to be liked and to be perceived as someone with a vibrant social life. We post pictures of lunch dates and gatherings with a loving caption when in reality we are all mindlessly scrolling through social media rather than communicating with each other. The crux of social media is social life and we have become rather to fake one than to make one. Thus, we are reluctant to build sound and deep relationships that do not involve tagging each other in a series of Instagram posts. We are simultaneously the receivers as well. We fail recognise the pictures and videos we see online do not reveal the truth of other users’ lives. That pushes us to reflect upon our social life that seems to never be as exciting as others’ and such contrast brews loneliness, insecurity, and jealousy. The unspoken truth of social media is that perfection on the internet is always fake. Failure to understand such truth develops unrealistic expectations in real life turns into disappointment. Disappointment turns into emptiness and emptiness consumes us.
It is as if social media knows about such emptiness and feeds us much media content in an attempt to fill that hole, unknowingly severing even our relationship with the world.
Social media content puts us in a constant struggle between depletion and surplus of attention that subsequently becomes a vicious cycle. Social media will start to develop mechanisms and algorithms to push ideas and content that they know users like. Users on the other hand are thrilled to watch them all and they become more and more addicted to that kind of content. Thus it leads to the rise of short-term content of Tiktok. Those videos or “Tiktoks” are often less than one minute which is perfect for users’ appetite but ineffective in making one understand anything. Young people lose the attention span to sit through even a 10-minute video on international affairs and would rather watch Addison Rae dance for 30 seconds and ultimately grow estranged from serious matters in their daily lives and become disconnected from the world as they grow to be connected to the web. Even if there are channels producing short videos that explain the Russian and Ukrainian war in three minutes, how much can young people truly get from 180 seconds? Teenagers become arrogant as they that kind of content shape their minds without developing real insights because they do not know enough to develop any opinions on their own while they firmly believe they know everything already.
This problem is worse with social media lacking filtering and gatekeeping of content. There are three kinds of inherently bad content that social media fails to prevent due to its passive nature as a platform. They are fake news, hate speech, and traumas. Anything has the potential to go viral and spread like wild fire on the internet. Fake news on social media is a worn-out topic and everyone understands the rationale behind how fake news adversely shape young minds but it has now evolved into a tool for manipulation and delivery of discriminatory content. People with perverse intention purposefully package information to prove their point and this problem combining with the echo chamber social media curates for each user leads to polarization. During the Black Lives Matter movement, there were articles exaggerating and even faking the damage done by the protestors and the violent acts of the police. The white supremeists and the equality activists both became blood boiled. Wars on the internet started. The young minds stuck in the middle are forced to pick a side. If they do not pick one themselves, social media will analyse past past behaviours and chooses one for them and pushes a mountain of content related to that ideology until they become a firm believer of that idea themselves. Young minds grow frantically defensive and reluctant to listen to, let alone accept, any foreign ideas and become disconnected from each other. Again, connection requires communication. Social media cuts the ties between people with different opinions and prevents them from communicating, understanding, connecting with each other. Polarization is the greatest form of disconnection. One’s eyes are blinded with bias and fail to connect with reality and other human beings.
The more heart chilling side of social media is the circulation of traumatic content in the absence of professional guidance. It sends shivers down one’s spine knowing that there are videos of tragedies all around social media. Watching such content is bound to leave an indelible mark on young minds yet social media promotes those kinds of content because it is controversial and subject to virality. Eventually teenagers become more and more insecure about society which leads to trauma and disconnection.
Unfortunately, social media is ubiquitous. It is indisputably a major channel of information delivery and the entire society will grow to attach to social media. There are no ways of preventing social media usage for good. Nevertheless, we can and should cultivate a correct mindset and perception of social media. At the end of the day, we are able to text with friends and meet strangers across the globe thanks to social idea. It is inherently flawed but not evil. As long as we remember that social media is a tool and a tool only, if we remain respectful, sceptical, and truthful, we should be able to flip the table and use social media to connect with each other again.
Yours faithfully,
Chris Wong