These days opening Social Media feels like visiting a zoo, where you wander around aimlessly seeing what other animals are up to. The life of those animals don’t affect yours in the slightest yet you look at them for a few minutes and continue to the next enclosement until you run out of them, in which case you exit after spending a chunk of your time. I see little to no benefit in this pointless loitering. You seldom learn anything new and most certainly won’t remember what you saw by the end of the day.
My complaints stem from the grim side-effects I see in daily, long-term users. The most common ones being:
- Mindless Scrolling: The best place to see this in action is when a person is waiting for someone or something (e.g. waiting in queues, standing in the elevator, etc.). Almost always you will find someone scrolling through their messages or scrolling past a few posts on Instagram/Facebook.
- Being Alone: This is more of an extension to the last point. It may seem trivial but the reality is people find it uncomfortable being alone without their devices. Try running errands with your phone at home and you may realise what I’m trying to say.
- Short Attention Span: It is a direct consequence of consuming short-form content which leads to people looking for instant dopamine hits, so entertainment mediums which require patience are often neglected because they are “boring”. I also depise the fact that Social Media orgs have incentivized producing such content as it is relatively quicker to produce, attracts a lot of views and leaves people wanting more. It ultimately becomes a positive-feedback loop where people keep coming for more and these orgs benefit from this in multiple ways (monetization, user data, increased DAU, etc.).
- Virtue Signaling: Oh, this one really grinds my gears. In a constant attempt to showcase themselves at their best,
people take it upon themselves to suggest/dictate how things should be to their “audience”. Everyone seems to masquerade
as certified experts – some in several fields – and feel the need to impart their bogus gyaan to others. In reality,
others seldom care let alone remember the “valuable information”.
Complaints aside, I have a few questions regarding some Instagram nonsense that I just can’t wrap my head around:
- Crossposting Birthday Stories: What is even the point? Are you trying to show how many people wished you? Are you trying to share the photo your friend used in the birthday wish story? Why are you crossposting the crossposted story?
- Stories: What is it about Boomerangs that you like so much? Why are you writing an entire blog post in your story with barely legible font size? Are the food photos also getting uploaded on Zomato where they could be of use?
