Social media Detoxification:A Millenial's Experience

Danger Will Robinson, Eject! Eject! These words echoed in my head every time I scrolled through my Facebook timeline. The closest thing I could be likened to was a drug naïve rat that was incapable of resisting the intense sweetness of sugar pellets. Social media came to my radar back in 2009.I was immediately hooked to Facebook and joined the gang of digital zombies. It took me years to realize that social media is not a revolutionary technology but one that offers some sort of social validation in exchange for minutes of your attention and bites of your personal data.Social media detoxification was my only option. The canary in the coal mine is that your personal data is packaged up and sold. Certainly, if you aren’t paying for the product you are the product.

Despite realizing social media does not produce a lot of value, I was so deep into it. Instead of using social media, social media was using me. The sad reality is that I was not alone. It appears that the 50 billion users of Facebook spend an average of 50 minutes per day in Messenger and Instagram. Without doubt, social media has changed our relationship with society. Personally, I am guilty of sharing my perfectly choreographed life to my online community (not that it isn’t far from perfect). The rush of adrenaline you get from the feedback in form of likes is similar to social currency. It can make or break your spirit. I later on discovered that majority of the social media sites hire attention engineers to make their products as addictive as possible.However, I finally pulled the plug early 2018. For those that intend on participating in the social media detoxification, deactivating your social media account is not the solution. The best option is to delete your account completely. Social media is a source of entertainment, one among many hence it will be more of rejecting one form of entertainment for another. This is especially for those that use it in an addictive fashion like yours truly. You will be exposed to FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) or even tagged as a ‘hippy’ though on the flip-side you will be more productive.

From experience during my social media detoxification, I still had friends, knew what was going on in the world and was still exposed to interesting ideas. In fact, I was still capable of connecting with people around the world. Not only was I better off without social media, I was happier and accomplished more professionally.Though majority of us may be ready to disapprove the fact that we use social media in an addictive fashion, Sean Parker one of the co-founders of Facebook confirmed that it was designed to be addictive. The key objective is to maximize on the profit that can be extracted from your attention and data. One of the shocking discoveries I made was that Facebook knew so much about me. From the data that was being collected for the past eight years, they had a database of my likes, dislikes, my family, friends even my location. Nobody would be comfortable with that. You could say that I am a victim of oversharing but at the end of it all, without even realizing, we all end up sharing these details. For instance, could you lie on your date of birth?To the best of my knowledge, social media is yet to be classified as addictive as gambling and alcoholism. A study by Turel & Bechara (2017) established that participants who used social media compulsively exhibited changes in the parts of the brain that control impulse. Social media affected the users in a wide array of ways that addictive substances do. My take is that social media does not produce a lot of value. If you can look at a sea of data and apply the right statistical tools that could transform policies, you will always be found without social media. If you are an avid user of social media, make use of the social media platforms, don’t let them use you. It is up to you to either take the blue pill or red pill.