Facebook. Twitter. Instagram. It seems that our generation is more plugged-in than ever. We are connected to so many forms of social media that we receive a constant stream of information about what our friends are doing… as well as a stream of information about people who were barely our acquaintances in high school. One study conducted by The Economist in 2009 found that women with 500 Facebook friends had actual interaction, such as “liking” or commenting on posts or pictures, with an average of 26 of these friends. There are certainly a multitude of benefits to social media. I often keep up with news stories via Twitter, and read tweets from friends that make me laugh on the daily. Facebook does make it easier to keep up with friends from home who are at other colleges, to figure out who knows who, to organize events, and to preserve funny memories and moments online. But life can’t really be chronicled by social media – simply clicking the “see friendship” button on Facebook doesn’t come close to capturing all the memories and laughs two people have shared.
There is a great deal of pressure, especially on young women, to project the right image via social media. It often seems that if a moment wasn’t somehow captured and preserved online, it didn’t really happen. Is there anything worse missing out on that group photo that everyone makes their cover photo the next day? Or being stuck in the library writing a paper and then reading a tweet about how much fun all your other friends are having. Or seeing pictures from an event that you couldn’t go to, or didn’t even know happened. With all of these social media tools, you know what everyone is doing… even if you don’t want to know.
Everyone needs to keep in mind that while a picture can “speak a thousand words,” it can’t tell a whole story. Over my Thanksgiving break freshman year, I was hanging out with a big group of kids from my high school, and one girl remarked, “it looks like you’re having so much fun at Bucknell!” I paused for a second, because the verb looks stuck out. I assumed the girl had looked at my recent Facebook photos and assumed I was having a great time. I was definitely having a ball at Bucknell, but the times where I laughed the hardest or had the best conversations with friends were not captured in my recent tags. The Caf dinners where my friends and I sat for hours crying with laughter weren’t tagged in posts, and the long Sunday morning walks with my roommate had not been tweeted. While photos certainly can capture the good times, they don’t capture it all.
So when can you unplug? I often enjoy running outside with no music. I usually use my iPhone as my iPod, and sometimes it’s hard to go out for a long run without being interrupted by a barrage of texts from a group message. Exercise is one of the best times to be alone with your thoughts without any interruptions. So I’ve started leaving the iPhone/iPod behind — it’s a nice change of pace. If you’re easily distracted when writing a paper or doing any other assignment, work on a library computer. You’re much less prone to spend time Facebook stalking if you’re using a computer in clear view, surrounded by other students working. If you need to have a serious conversation or discussion with someone, don’t do it over text, phone or “FB chat.” Go for a walk, get coffee, do whatever you need to do to be face-to-face. If it seems to be increasingly difficult to enjoy a nice dinner with friends without receiving a text or notification from some outside source interrupting real face-to-face communication, make a rule with your girlfriends that you’ll temporarily put away all phones so you can actually “be together” and catch up. And if you can’t bear to be unplugged when you’re awake, when getting ready for bed, turn your phone vibrate off, shut down the computer, and say goodnight. Remember, anything that happens online will still be there in the morning!
I won’t deny that I love getting a notification that someone has posted new pics, or maybe receiving a new friend request. I frequently enjoy “back stalking” and remembering fun times through photos, but when Biz Stone, the co-founder of Twitter, spoke at our campus earlier this month, one point of his really stuck with me: technology is what you make of it. Here’s how I interpreted it: use social media to your advantage but do not let it define you. It’s important to keep track of memories, but not all of them have to be commemorated on a Facebook page. Try recording them in a journal. Unplugging will give you more time to reflect, and will allow you to experience life’s purest moments without interruptions.