Is it possible to use social media in a balanced way?
I suppose there must be someone somewhere who does it. But when I talk with people, almost everyone says they want to spend less time on social media. They want it to be more of a tool they use with an end goal in mind, instead of just mindlessly scrolling.
But mindlessly scrolling is what everyone ends up doing. They are force-fed content they don’t care about that has been engineered to grab their attention.
I remember watching something about how food companies engineer chip flavors years ago. A lot goes into it, but the idea is that there is a quick pop of flavor that goes away quicker than you’d expect and leaves you wanting more. They don’t optimize for the best taste or a long-lasting pleasant experience, they optimize for how many chips you will eat.
As you scroll through your feed of dumb videos with occasional posts from people you actually care about is that not the same experience?
You’ve probably arrived at this realization before and there are three paths people take from there:
- Do nothing
- Try to quit everything
- Create some sort of time or behavioral restriction, like 20 min a day or I’ll only go on to post things I’m working on
Purely guessing based on listening to people around me, I’d say most people want to believe that they can create a balance, but that quitting entirely is a strategy that works a lot more often.
There is no doubt that Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok can be powerful networking and marketing tools. But the question you’ve got to wrangle with is, are they tools you are using?
If you have a saw in your garage, and every time you touch it you cut yourself, and over years you’ve never actually used it, the best thing to do is get rid of it. Sell it, lend it to a friend, throw it away. If you find you need to cut down a tree in your yard you can get another one.
If you keep saying that you want to get off of social media, but can’t because it is how you stay connected with your friends or it is an important marketing tool, then you need to figure out if that is actually true. Log out for a month, see if you have the self-control to follow through, find out if you miss anything, and discover new tools that might work better for you.
As an individual trying to use social media for productive ends, you are in a David vs Goliath battle. Goliath has thousands of diligent workers testing, experimenting, and innovating to try and increase your time on the app.
They don’t want you to be happier, to feel more connected to friends, or to have better business connections. They want you stuck scrolling for hours and hours every single day so they can feed you advertising. Time on app is the end goal and the entire structure is designed with that in mind.
So if you want to use it for your own goals, you need to have a clear strategy and a plan for how you will implement it.
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