How does social media make us feel lonely?
About five months ago, I moved to New York City alone for my master degree in Communication Design, the city that I had been dreaming about and longing to spend some time living. The first few weeks were all exciting and fresh; I visited the museums that been saving on my list, wandered around the streets with beautiful brownstones on the sides, even an afternoon spent just lying on the great lawn of central park was a delight. The time that I spent alone has never felt so wonderful.
But as the time passes, my days have more stepped into a routine; the repetitive streets became dull; school, home, and assignments grew into my weekday essentials, but I’m nevertheless just by myself. Still, I’d try keeping in touch with my friends that are all over the places. While the truth is that we’re thousand-mile apart, they became the dweller of my tiny smart device that is designed for better communication. Texting and calling will do the catch-up if time differences allow us, but all the other times, checking their posts on Facebook and Instagram will do the job.
Gradually, social media has turned into my everyday essential too. From each morning when I open my eyes, until the last second before going to sleep, I check everything frequently to keep myself updated, so I’d know all these little details that barely matter. I get to know that A went to traveling somewhere south-east Asia, B took some new friends to a hike, C had another seemingly awesome party with a bunch of people over… It went on for hours, and I’m drifting away, when I finally pulled myself out of my thoughts, I realized that I’m just sitting here in front of my desk, alone, and that was the moment that I finally felt it.
How ironic, the point that I felt most abandoned, happens to be the point I seem most attended to my long-distance friend’s life, through social media. How does the world that’s designed and built upon pixels on screen isolate us so much in real life?
It is not something implicit that social media are having more of an adverse impact on us nowadays, yet we still can’t help comparing our inner lives to the curated ones displayed on the screen. What even was the original purpose when social media was first designed and how did it develop to become what it is now?
French philosopher René Girard has brought out the idea of ‘mimetic desire’ in his book Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World. ‘Man is the creature who does not know what to desire, and who turns to others in order to make up his mind. We desire what others desire because we imitate their desires.’ And social media, being a platform that most of the time presents our lives or ‘ideal lives’ shall I call it, is the perfect tool that serves the ones that are on the other side of the screen, and their needs to copy.
Beyond the curated selves and our mimetic desires, social media seems to not helping with socializing in real life either. When we as designers create a more convenient way to socialize, such as the like button and the stories feature on Instagram, it changes the way how people socialize. It has become more and more common to engage with people’ lives by simple interactions online such as liking a post or watch a ten seconds video about their lives, making an effort to schedule an appointment and meet in person seems like a quite old fashion way to socialize now.
The fragmented information on social media has broken down our attention too; despite the fact that we’re getting used to reading short pieces of information rather than an entire book, social media has also broken into our interpersonal interactions. It’s not an unusual scene to see two people having dinner together while both on their phones, or everybody’s scrolling over their feeds instead of talking to the person next to them at a party. Our attentions are always divided now, and our social interactions in real life are shattered into fragments as well.
Being designers, we should know the best of what’s behind the seemingly smart design for better communications or socialize here. Instead of designing to meet the needs, we’re creating desires, and make people believe that’s what they need; from something small like social applications, a smart device, to something bigger such as an ideal lifestyle. We made the platform for people to ‘present’ and ‘follow’, meanwhile creating all these unnecessary desires. The designs aren’t authentic anymore; we designed a seemingly socializing platform, but instead, there’re only more and more empty souls left in real life.
In Marshall McLuhan’s work The Medium is the Message, he had the idea of “What the medium is saying sometimes prevents us from seeing what the medium is doing.” We created new mediums to deliver the messages, however, what the medium is doing to our world should be way more important for us to focus on. Perhaps, the next most important task for us is to design our design, by really putting thoughts into the role of the medium, rather than just focusing on the messages.
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