Originally published in print November 2020.
In a world dominated by social media – especially in 2020 when everything is online – we are surrounded constantly by a ton of apps, devices, and a barrage of constant information. This makes it difficult to concentrate on one thing at a time, meaning that we have become a generation of “multi-taskers”, which can be very helpful when we have many things to get done, but can also be extremely detrimental to our focus and attention spans. Before the time of Tik Tok, Snapchat, and even the Internet, people were able to focus on reading a book and absorbing everything without thinking about their phone, their laptop, or their social media feeds. Now, we listen to music while doing everyday tasks such as cooking and studying, and we mindlessly scroll through social media while walking down the street or drinking coffee in the morning.
Social media isn’t directly ruining our attention spans – instead, our brains have too much to process with all of the social media and other content that we see, making it very hard to concentrate on one thing at a time. We in turn find it increasingly difficult to keep up with everything that we see, hear, and attempt to process.
There is another effect social media has on people, especially from a young age – it becomes a distraction, a way to escape everything else, and therefore starts to affect self-control. Instead of focusing on work or completing tasks efficiently, we aimlessly scroll through media or watch Netflix. This scrolling becomes so automatic that we can double task, and even multi task while scrolling through media and not even realize it – suddenly we can’t concentrate on any specific task at one time. There is so much information coming at us from all angles that we begin to become desensitized to certain things, such as violence and guns. Social media has an extreme effect especially on people’s minds, in many ways affecting how they feel and act. This often expands into warping their self-esteem and invading their minds with uncontrollable thoughts about how they should look, act and what they should be doing. There is an influx of edited and fake information and photos on every platform, and this causes pressure on people that can come up at any point during everyday life.
While there are certainly negative consequences of social media usage, it is also arguable that social media can be used in a very positive way. Especially in the midst of the current pandemic when many aspects of life have been forced online, we can clearly see the role social media played in spreading the message of political movements, creating accessible forms of online protest, amplifying the voices of the body-positivity community and connecting with others. People can share so much information with each other – their favourite recipe for a pasta dish, their favourite playlist on Spotify, or even their Christmas movie recommendations. While social media, admittedly, does have the negative effect of making us think in certain ways, as well as shortening our attention spans as we try to take in an exorbitant amount of content, it also has positive effects and keeps us in a community with other people, connecting us and giving us content that we want to find at the end of our fingertips.
