You wanna know what’s been pissing me off recently?
Or to use a phrase my friend loves, really been ‘grinding my gears’?
I was casually scrolling through Instagram and came across an adorable picture of a celebrity with his new baby. Turns out this baby had been tagged in the photo because despite being less then a month old, he has his own Instagram account. And though he doesn’t have any posts yet, he already has 5,000+ followers waiting to like and comment on whatever cute photo his parents decide they want to broadcast to the world under his name.
It made me so angry to see that this poor child, who can’t even say his parents’ name yet, let alone his own, has had this huge decision made for him without his consent.
He doesn’t even know what consent means yet!
My parents have always been very careful not to post pictures of me or my brother on their social platforms. I didn’t even get social media until the autumn of last year, because frankly I just didn’t really fancy it. But I know that I, alongside my family, have always been very conscious of what goes out there into the big scary world that is the Internet.
So many studies have shown how damaging social media has the power to be.
But, it doesn’t have to be.
I must confess, I love using Instagram and being able to look at other people’s pictures as well as getting nice comments on my own. It’s great fun.
But I feel very privileged to have made that choice to put myself ‘out there’ when I wanted to, in the way that I wanted to.
I was looking on my Dad’s Facebook a few days ago – now Facebook is something I still cannot understand; I’m getting far better with Instagram, but Facebook remains a totally foreign concept to me – and I found a photo that someone else had posted of me and my family.
It was at a time when I had big plastic blocks in my mouth, also known as retainers, that meant my top and bottom teeth were pulled apart in order to move my jaw forward. I spoke with a lisp and honestly, I hated it and how it made me look.
To say that this photo was unflattering of me would be an understatement. I didn’t have any social media when this was posted (no, I don’t consider WhatsApp to be social media, despite what my brother might say) so I didn’t have any kind of online presence, or whatever you’d like to call it.
To find out that this picture had been posted totally without my consent was really upsetting.
To them it was just proof to their followers that they’d been on an aesthetic walk along the beach, whereas to me, it was a hideous photo which I didn’t want publicise to a load of strangers.
Social media is a bit like the ocean. It has the power to sweep you up in its clutches and leave you with no choice but to surrender, or you can respect its potential power without letting yourself get out of your depth.
I don’t want this to sound like an anti-social media rant.
Social media, as a whole, often gets a really bad rep. Scientists, teachers, parents, all seem to claim the internet is the sole source of all teenager’s problems.
In reality, it has been an unbelievably positive thing at times.
Just earlier this month, TikTok pranked Donald Trump, getting people to reserve seats at his rally in Tulsa so that he believed 1 million people would show when in fact only 6,200 turned up.
We did that. Social media gave us the power to do that.
But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be wary of it.
Our pictures, our posts, our profiles are more often than not the portrayal of our lives that we want other people to see. It’s a filtered, romanticised reality. And it’s great.
But it’s not reality.
And sadly we are at risk of living our lives through our screens.
So many of us, myself included, find comfort in checking our phones while waiting for the bus, the train, the end of an awkward silence, the conversation to turn to something more interesting...
It’s a safety net. A very comfortable, familiar one.
It’s funny how we often find so much solace in social media and our technology and yet it can also be the place where we are most vulnerable, most exposed.
Hate is much easier to spread when you’re behind your phone rather than face to face. Showing love can be expressed through a few emojis and who needs to pluck up the courage to ask someone on a date when you can just pop the question via direct message?
I spent New Years in London two Christmases ago. Having waited for hours for the spectacular firework display, I was horrified to see as the chimes of midnight began and the sky lit up, thousands of phones were raised in the air. Twenty minutes of filming later, and all these people who had viewed the entire spectacle through their screens packed up and left.
End of evening. End of experience.
What do you do with that footage?
Who goes home and watches a bad quality twenty-minute firework display recorded on their phone?!
It was like a competition; may the longest arm win. Those few of us who wanted to view the moment right there and then through our very eyes had to practically clamber on top of each other in order to see above the sea of phones.
Why do we show how much we value an experience by how much storage it takes up in our camera roll?
These people who filmed the fireworks can’t even go and print out their recording in order to pop it on a frame on the mantelpiece or show the grandparents.
So much about technology is incredible.
And we aren’t in a position to turn back time to a world where phones were not the central focus of our lives, even if we wanted to.
But next time you’re with the family, hanging out with your friends, cuddling an adorable baby and you feel like what would make the moment even better is if you could capture it, record it, post it, promote it, hashtag it, instead- think about how you can saver it without doing all of that.
Sure take a photo, video it, but don’t let that dictate the worth of the moment.
Don’t play up to the camera so that when those images appear on someone’s account later, people can see just what an amazing time you had.
Moment’s aren’t valued this way.
It’s harder to appreciate reality.
But we need to.
That text can wait. If you’re enjoying people’s company, enjoy it, rather than checking your notifications as soon as your pocket lights up or vibrates. If the conversation is dying, don’t start scrolling through posts, start another conversation. Check in on reality. Because no matter how great the footage, moments are fleeting and no amount of pixels can capture the spectacular now.
Especially having been in lockdown and devoid of physical and human contact, let’s try and value our moments with the people we love not through our screens but through, well, our eyes.
Comments