I agree with almost everything she said. Cutting out social media is something I try to do often, but am not exactly successful. I’ve deleted and re-downloaded my social media applications 3 times in the last two weeks. So to hear about her successful 30-day fast is very impressive! I want to be able to do something similar. I definitely see how social media harms our brains – I feel it affecting my attention span but don’t do anything to stop it, I also see how it contributes to this eager desire for peer validation. I remember not caring much what people think about me, but now I also conduct an “Instagram draft” and think hard before selecting a caption. What surprises me is that she was able to do this while in college, and as a social media marketer! I am the social media manager for a club and that is often the reason preventing me from staying away from Instagram. In college I can’t stay off for long and give myself the excuse of “oh it’s a group assignment, I need to be responsive on social media” or “I’m gonna need to reach out to people in my classes”. These do seem like plausible causes, and that is why it baffles me that she was able to stay off social media for so long.
The comment about peer validation strikes me because it does seem to be a big motivating factor for usage of Instagram on college campuses, for example, when people are trying to navigate campuses and target where they can find compatible friends and social networks during their experience attending college. I also think too hard about captioning an Instagram post! I want to say I am immune to feelings associated with knowing others perceive me, but it does really control my behavior and representation choices on social media. I try to be myself off the Instagram page with close friends in person as much as I can instead of looking for the superficial social media validation, so breaks from social media are freeing in this way.
I also watched this video, and I think that social media is beneficial in many ways because it allows us to connect and it opens up opportunities, but it definitely does have an intense hold on society. I am always on the app Tik Tok, but it sucks up so much time, that I have to delete it on the weekdays when I have work to get done, and I redownload it on the weekends to relax. This is an extreme compulsion, that I don’t fully understand, because I don’t want to be wasting time.