I, like many others, have a trepidatious relationship with social media. Everybody who has deleted apps to only later redownload them, taken down photos because of the lack of response they garnered, changed profile photo to reflect the new me as of this week when I bought this new outfit, posted screenshots of what song they’re listening to (turning music into silent, cold self-advertisement), erased chats that have with age moulded with cringe, waited impatiently for a vibration to tranquil the incessant thirst of the mind for that certain somebody to reply, or any other activity which involves the droll of two thumbs tapping away a screen, like pigeons onto a street dispersed with breadcrumbs, might be part of this ‘many others’. I’ve reason to expect anybody who has used social media, is part. I’ve also reason to expect ninety-nine percent of us alive have come into contact with social media, from infants being indoctrinated in the myriad of screens that have interchangeably become to be deemed as necessary as a tap and a toilet in millions upon millions of households, to the elderly who without such new-fangled, hippidy-dippidy devices would have surely pruned up in complete abandonment during this current time of social restriction. God bless the tribes that exist on desolate islands that have never had to remind the robot that ‘I am not a robot’. Ever-present, it is an alien communication whose engrossing existence was once only thinkable through some strong belief in God; yet, whilst these glossy, enticing monoliths remind us of our place in history, they are concurrently the most camouflaged tools of mass destruction of the self.

All a bit dark and gloomy and dismal. Let’s put a rose-tinted filter over the topic for now and be optimistic. Let us all be happy. And fun. And gay. But how?

My temporary solution is a short poem I have written about the topic at hand:

Acrylic osmosis

when breaking my brim

abate, or expel, this out-of-vogue grin.

Let the body too be wooden and dry,

easel-like legs for swamp-swathed eyes.

Rectify up the sloped shape of the chin

and burrow in spaces much worth mentioning.

Hang me on ceilings or somewhere nearby

someone with a score-chart and pencil might find.

Okay, perhaps not the most light-hearted poem in the world. But short moments of temporary distraction, like poetry, or the mere inner musing in letting oneself daydream into a cloudy, amorphic abyss, with glazed over eyes and hazy imagination – such releases I would argue are as essential as therapy to the human condition. Yet, with these tags in our hands, we are unable to simply exist without an interference of the flow. My sister once told me that she has to sleep with her phone not on do-not-disturb (whose opposite ‘do-disturb’ highlights the point I make here), in case she should sleep through someone ringing her in a desperate time of need. When I then asked her if she had ever had anybody awaken her from slumber and speak to her on the phone in a time of peril, she said that: yes, sure, this hasn’t happened to her yet. No one has rung her with their final words, about to take their own life or needed her for some task that could only be remedied in that very moment – no, no one had yet. Similarly, that has never happened to me. So why do we fear being sliced out of the web of intercommunications whilst we allow ourselves the beauty sleep we rightfully deserve after the whole procedure of the day it proceeded?

Perhaps this phobia is new to our generation, or it could be prescribed with one of the predecessors of ages before, anxiety, depression, or whatever you want to call it – there is, regardless, some impact this presence has upon the users’ sense of reality. Everybody computes this in different ways. But it is a somewhat shared phenomenon, and this is my mere ramblings about it. The hope is that shared experiences (the comparative way in which social media works upon this blueprint akin) help to bond communities, invite a space for discussion and dispute, and in doing so, better the participants as individuals with collated senses of selfhood. We better ourselves by being challenged with opposing viewpoints; they strengthen the foundations already implemented or magnify the loose-ends of the half-arsed constructed groundwork – bringing them to our attention, we might be inclined to reconsider our hitherto perception. Yet, when we are confined to our ‘social bubble’, are our views really contested? The only trolls are those bodiless and nameless, amongst the plethora of online persons – our immediate, tangible circle tend to lean in favour to our political ideologies. Most my friends align with the same beliefs that I agree with. Those I find too disruptive to this on my feed I might unfollow, unfriend, or (the most devilish of them all, with its unknowable nature to those who it is dealt upon) mute. Thereby, I encompass myself with likeminded content that will gratify my moralistic sense of self, as if I were everyday declining an invitation to an orgy of barbarians.

This is not real though. There are barbarians amidst us; I need go no further than remind us who the current US President is, and who (deepest apologies to all the Tory readers, of which I am sure there will certainly be a handful) is the current UK Prime Minister. I would argue the tired notion that whilst social media makes us feel more involved in the outer dialogue, it infact is seclusive, and marginalises the general scope of what we want to see through the filters of whomsoever it is that we so happen to wake up to everyday as we check our feeds before taking the bold step out of bed and into the real world therein. I would argue this if I wholeheartedly agree with the notion, but I do not, at least not with every fibre of my being. For a sense of community has always been a running of practise of culture and of civilisation itself, and where once the agora of Ancient Greece bore witness to opposing thoughts being put to the scrutiny of fellow civilians, now Twitter operates by this long-used framework. The hashtag allows one to zoom in on a topic of choice, wag one’s toes in pools of thought, imprint on a comrades back a red heart in solidarity, or rebuke whatever utter farce demands your comment to shut down the moron who could possibly think that the earth is flat, or that vaccination does worse than it does better, or that we should feel sympathetic towards our Prime Minister. 

Unfortunately, I am not of the opinion that this methodology of counterattack actually does anything. It’s quite useless, for the power and persuasiveness is stunted by the number-of-words restrictions or the lack-of-actual-information-to-back-my-points reality, which I am sure is a hurdle that most can relate to, though they may be inapt to admit it. And once more, it is whoever refuses to back down that appears to have won the battle; the final comment is the ultimate K.O., and if their opponent will not rise by the count of 3, well, we appear to have a winner. In actual reality (though where this hazy line is situated is becoming less and less apparent) we have the primal modes of intimidation, like wild hand gesturing, and tone of voice, to curve our argument into something that may actually stand a chance of really getting registered and considered. I pose the question: has an argument online ever made you reconsider your opinion on the topic of debate? I cannot recall a single instance in my time using social media in which I could genuinely say my thoughts were recalibrated from a one-on-one status war. If anything, both parties came out more self-assured of their original perspective, which has been polished by its core being untouched; the black mirror unscathed, a trusty shield.

There should, however, be a delineation made between such instances as I have just rendered, and the wide-sweeping, slower burning movements which for the most part have seen genuinely positive cultural progress. The #MeToo movement needs no introduction. And also, it must not be forgotten that social media also functions as a means of mere entertainment, however mind-numbing such entertainment becomes after scrolling for guilty amounts of time down one’s feed (as a friend of mine once rightfully coined such procrastination: ‘depression scrolling’). Our generation have an extension of mere language in the ways in which we communicate; meme culture has become commonplace amongst circles of friend, with lines from videos being readily adopted before then being replaced by funnier, glossier new-things-of-the-day. The sheer absurdity that has come to epitomise 21st-century-humour reflects the deconstructed reality it is born out of. There’s something really cutting-edge about it all, and community is created through the shared Tweets, Vines and Tiktoks which we all are so familiar with amongst peers that might not otherwise see fully eye to eye. These elements are why we use the god-awful apps in the first place, but where there be sunshine, will there tomorrow be storm.

Thankyou Harry for asking me to do a little piece for your website, which I am enjoying reading between online university classes and zoom calls whenever I get the chance. And if you’ve made it this far, thanks for reading!