Do you experience a certain pressure to be exceptional? To have fun or be productive all the time? I definitely do. This seems to me a pretty big aspect of social media, though I wouldn't say it was consciously devised, it's more like a consequence of what gets shared the most. The internet tends to promote the outliers — good or bad — simply because they're the most interesting. The most exceptionally skilled people, or who lead the weirdest lives, or who share absolutely unhinged views about things or people, or who are constantly traveling and "having fun".
The thing however is that because social media only captures snapshots of a surface layer of life, what it portrays is absolutely not real life, and not even the real lives of those who perform on those platforms. In an important sense, social media strikes me as promoting a form of pornography. Productivity porn. Advice porn. Outrage porn. Happiness porn. Charity porn. And of course straight up pornography.
Pornography is the manufactured attraction of the unreal, which in the process loses all authenticity, subtlety, and ultimately, quality. It titillates and dissociates, rather than slows down consciousness, which could allow it to experience something fully, in all its subtlety. It makes people stuck in their fantasies, anxious and desperate to feel good.
Images are particularly good at pornography, both in the usual sense and the broader sense of that term which I've been discussing so far, because they're so easy to scroll through and get a strong impression from. That's why it's vital to me to curate what images actually reach my experience. Honestly, there is something to be said about quitting all of social media altogether, though I'm sure there are other, softer possibilities as well: disabling images on twitter (I know it's possible on mobile, but I haven't found how on desktop), following better people and sticking to the "Following" feed. 1
All in all, that kind of subconscious influence is too powerful in my experience. Better see the dynamics of social media for what they are, and remove the toxic side as much as possible.
1 There is a great addon for twitter that eliminates many annoying features, including the "For you" timeline. It’s called “Minimal Twitter” and you can find it here.
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2024-06-21