Patricia Greig: Offline and loving it

If you quit social media the world won't stop, it may actually free up more time for living. Photo / 123RF

Opinion

I haven't been a member of a social media website for six months and life couldn't be better. Six months, cold turkey. And there's no going back.

I've had enough of people knowing where I am all the time. I was tired of validating my "friends" with likes and comments and filling up my mind with thoughts about people's actions which weren't immediate. The people I want to hear from have my cellphone number, and if they don't have much to say they don't call me. During that time I travelled to Singapore and the US and didn't post a single photo of myself. The world didn't stop.

Psychologist Beth Anderson reviews Facebook culture in her paper Facebook Psychology: Popular Questions Answered by Research. She and her colleagues found the site can become addictive and make people unhappy. They found people with narcissistic qualities checked their pages more and a high disclosure of information depended on a person's need for popularity.

I often hear that people "spend all day on Facebook" or they are bored, so spend time on the site waiting to talk to someone before they get bored on Facebook too. How are you, as a human being supposed to remain stimulated and healthy when you become bored of the thing that is your go-to-tool to be interested? Why do you go there? To put your friends under surveillance, read about other people's lives and judge them or compare yourself?

Lurking around social media is a poor replacement for human interaction. Are you really going to say Facebook is keeping you connected in a busy modern world? Those condolences and congratulations you write are merely skimmed over by multiple pairs of eyes you don't know.

In the real world a person can gain an understanding of a situation and react accordingly. A profile contains easy-to-digest information and its users make decisions with limited facts. On social media, users can't hear the tone of your voice, see your gestures or feel your touch. It is hard to understand how this interaction is enough to maintain meaningful relationships. You may as well send an emoji the next time someone's cat dies.

Do you enjoy making friends with people you have never met and imagining they care about the 140 characters you're allowed to use in a tweet to discuss the important issues that make no difference to either of your lives? If you answered yes, perhaps it is good that your communication has a character limit.

In July, Science published a study by University of Virginia psychologist Timothy Wilson. He asked 409 students to sit in a room and think - the only distraction being small electric shocks participants could administer themselves. Many "preferred to administer electric shocks to themselves instead of being left alone with their thoughts. Most people seem to prefer to be doing something rather than nothing, even if that something is negative."

Immersion in social media is a distraction and hindrance to creativity. People under the influence of social media feel they can't be alone with their thoughts, even though, as Anderson writes, it has the potential to make them feel bad.

• Patricia Greig is a Herald sub-editor.