To curb social media, boost real life

Zack Muddle (Solidarity 767) is right that public ownership and workers’ control offers greater ability to stem the harms of social media, centring social wellbeing rather than profit. The drive for profit is central to the addictive, isolating nature of social media. High use drives profit for the platform and harm for the user.

It is clear that the trend in social media is from your online life complementing your real life towards it replacing it. Facebook initially had “friends” based around a real-life university campus life. Now Instagram has followers and TikTok has viewers and creators.

MySpace asked you to rank your real-world top friends, causing playground negotiations and recriminations. Facebook was created with the creepy but real-life use of finding and rating women in students’ Harvard University classes. When I was in my first year of uni the most popular Facebook page for Newcastle University was “Let’s have sex in the library”, a page that gave out a weekly instruction to indicate you wanted to have sex in the library e.g. wear one of your trouser legs up, wear a paper crown, etc.

Now, more and more, social media situates your real-life friends amidst a carousel of celebrities and influencers.

In explaining the spike in mental health issues through the 2010s and 2020s Matt Cooper says that austerity alone is unlikely to be the complete explanation. It is hard to measure the mental health of a society. Diagnosis is one of the few sources of data, but is not the whole story. Have diagnoses increased because we are now more scientifically literate and have greater access to information? Are differences more medicalised with things considered mental health problems that were not before?

Certainly, it feels to those who have lived through the 2010s and 2020s that people are getting more anxious and lonelier. It would be reductive to argue that youth clubs closed so young people got depressed and lonely, especially given that a minority of young people ever used state youth provision. The loss of formal youth provision has been accompanied (and probably dwarfed by) the loss of informal youth spaces.

I did not go to a youth centre for the entire of my secondary school years. I did go to Wandsworth Common every Friday along with hundreds of other south London teens looking to drink alcohol, smoke and get off with each other. We can’t argue that this was a particularly healthy pursuit, like going to a youth club, but it did constitute face to face social interaction. Park drinking, parties, sleepovers, playing on the street, playing across housing estates, hanging round shopping centres have all become less common.

This is not just the pull of phones sucking children into the online world; it is also the overprotective and overpoliced offline world. Children are under-protected from the harms of social media, but this goes hand in hand with them being given too little freedom to roam in the real world because of policing of public space and parental anxiety about safety.

Adults obviously do have a lot more freedom for real life social experience, though they too have lost free social spaces with the loss of social infrastructure and libraries and other privatisation of the public realm. Social media that centres social wellbeing rather than profit must go hand in hand with the rebuilding of IRL social life.

Ruth Cashman, London