By: Katie Kaminski, Edited By: Megan Montgomery

Social Media Cleanse Series

When I see someone on Instagram with a large following, I can’t help but think Wow, she is so popular! I know I’m not the only one who thinks along these lines. To a certain degree, we all tend to associate a large amount of followers with happiness and popularity. Instagram has become the platform in which this generation not only communicates but also determines social worth. We do have to be careful, though, because the number of followers someone has does not always correlate to the number or value of a person’s friendships.

In today’s world, it’s so easy to assume things about a person based on their social media, like the number of friends they do or don’t have. However, research suggests that loneliness is the same whether you have 150,000 followers or 150. The more time people spend scrolling through social media, even if they have thousands of followers and get hundreds of likes on their photos, the lonelier they are going to feel.

Borae Jin and Namkee Park of South Korea’s Yonsei University explored this idea of loneliness as it relates to social media use. In a study published in New Media & Society, Jin and Park surveyed 374 individuals on how often they use their cell phones, how much face-to-face interaction they have, and the degree to which they feel lonely. The results of their survey showed, as one might expect, that the greater use of cell phones and the less face-to-face interaction an individual has, the more alone they feel. They also found that poor social skills are associated with fewer face-to-face interactions, meaning that the more time people spend talking to a screen and not to a person, the more socially awkward they are going to be.

We hear this stuff constantly, most of the time from our parents and the people of their generation. Do we always believe them? I know that I always take what my parents tell me about social media with a grain of salt. I mean, they don’t really get it, right? They grew up when they had to memorize their best friend’s home phone number and call them on the family phone. They don’t understand what it’s like to grow up with social media being the norm. They don’t get that growing up, you had to have social media, or you weren’t cool. This is what my generation grew up with and it affects how we act today. I decided that I wanted to find out how social media actually impacted and affected me, so I set out on a three-day cleanse from all social media.

For this cleanse, I was allowed phone calls but no FaceTime. I was allowed email but no texting. And absolutely no social media. This meant no Twitter, no Instagram, no Facebook, and no Snapchat (but what about my streaks?!). Before this cleanse, I would not have considered myself to be “addicted” to social media by any means. I considered myself to be pretty good about being off my phone. But, seeing the difference when I wasn’t allowed to use any of the time-wasting apps that I usually scroll through, just as a way to look busy, really put everything into perspective.

I could no longer pull out my phone and scroll through Instagram as an excuse to not make eye contact and say hello to that girl from my first-year seminar class I pass in the hall. Instead, I had to give her that awkward smile of acknowledgment. I could no longer text my dad and tell him about the good grade I got on a test. Instead, I had to call him, which led to over an hour long but great conversation. I could no longer do most of the things I usually would do to waste my time. And it was kind of refreshing.

I talked to the woman standing behind me in line for security at the airport. We had a good conversation and it made what is usually the worst part of the airport not so bad. I talked and I mean talked to my best friend who I hadn’t seen in over half a year. Through all of this, I noticed that in the silence and lulls of the conversation, where I would usually pull out my phone in order to make it seem as though I had something important to do, I was now able to just look around and find something new to say. I was no longer frightened by the awkwardness of silence. I was so much more observational and curious when I didn’t have my phone as a backup for an uncomfortable conversation.

Seventy-two hours later, when I turned notifications back on for all my apps, I responded to the necessary texts, but found out that most of the crises that people texted me about had magically resolved themselves without my help! I also realized that my streaks on Snapchat weren’t a big deal. The people who really wanted to talk to me for who I am, and not for the streak, just picked up right where we left off. My 1,300 Instagram followers didn’t even notice I took a break. To be honest, no one would have even cared even if they did notice. So, instead of wasting the limited time I had with my best friend on worthless apps that only diluted my sense of belonging, I got to spend that time with people who truly care about me and, I didn’t once feel alone.