According to Jenny Odell’s text, The case for doing nothing, phones are shaping the attention economy and are controlling how we think and how we view things. The attention economy is the idea that human attention is a valuable currency or commodity. So while digital and social media might be free to use, there is still a valuable amount of attention paid.

A few months ago, I would have honestly dismissed this rhetoric as “boomer” discourse (at least I’m self-aware enough to call myself out on it). However, recently I have developed an aversion to social media and my phone after realizing the impacts that it has on my brain. The impact I experience is different from what negative impacts of social media are stereotypically considered to be. I am grateful that looking at perfect bodies and faces does not fill me with a sense of negative body image, however, it is a perfectly valid concern and happens to a lot of people. In fact, it is an important pressing issue that needs to be talked about. 

My issue is a little different. I grew up on the internet. Facebook witnessed my entire childhood as I foolishly overshared every little thought I ever had. Facebook saw me play Pet Society for hours on end and witnessed my One Direction phase. Now that I want to distance myself from my past mistakes and acknowledge my growth, the past isn’t really in the past, it’s in the Facebook database. Every time I want to present a refined, curated version of me that was genuinely birthed out of self-growth and introspection, the Memories feature reminds me of my unfiltered and flawed past. I think it is ironic how we think that social media helps us hide behind a screen and present ourselves as whatever we want to be because I think my social media has seen me at my most authentic and vulnerable.

Here is a video of 12-year-old me either being extremely wise by saying that using my laptop all the time isn’t good for me, or being an absolute hypocrite because I used my laptop all the time anyway. 

 

Every single word you type, even if you delete it before posting it gets stored. It is a sense of vulnerability like no other. During an internship, I accidentally copy-pasted a YouTube lyric video instead of a link to the company’s blog post on the company’s Facebook page. While I deleted it in time and did not post it, Facebook knows. Facebook always knows. Well, whoever’s reading this now also knows so maybe this anecdote was a little counter-intuitive. Please don’t tell my former boss. 

What scares me is that I didn’t even think twice about the surveillance and amount of my information that was being stored. Only after a lot of reflection and introspection this summer, did I finally realize that I spend hours of my time aimlessly scrolling and providing information to mobile apps that don’t do much for my mental health besides making it worse.

In addition to this, since I grew up on the internet, I feel like I owe it all my thoughts. I think I have to read every single article I find on my social media and interact with it. I think that if I do not voice my political opinions on everything, I will be in trouble. It is paradoxical because I do believe that everyone with a platform has some sort of social responsibility to raise their voice for the marginalized.  In the text, Odell talks about how “doing nothing” entails an active process of listening that brings about real change in terms of racial and environmental justice among other issues. I thought that was so important because I always felt like I was being complicit if I was logging off and doing nothing. However, Odell creates a distinction between being complicit and stopping to introspect. 

Using social media became incredibly difficult for me this summer due to the rapid politicization of Instagram and the new wave of the #MeToo movement in Pakistan. I would typically be so grateful for the fact that sexual harassers and assaulters are being outed, but this summer I found myself losing control and reading posts disregarding the trigger warnings that accompanied them. In Stand Out of Our Light, Williams points out how social media triggers distract our navigation through informational space. While at first glance, this seems to be limited to frivolous distractions, in my experience, it isn’t just limited to those. 

For example, I would glance at my phone to check my emails and before I knew it, I would have spent an hour reading in-depth posts about a femicide case that had happened in my country. After that hour, I would be reading comments victim-blaming the victim and fruitlessly interacting (read fighting) with those comments. Then, I would be reporting extremely offensive, threatening, and misogynistic comments on the posts, only for them to not be taken down because they were made in Urdu and apparently the Facebook and Instagram algorithm isn’t smart enough to recognize that comments made in another language can violate their community guidelines. (This is very puzzling because it is smart enough for targeted advertisements and adding links to vaccine information if Covid is mentioned). Even with my phone off, I would constantly be thinking about the horrible things I saw on my screen for hours and how I wasn’t able to do anything about them. This is why I decided to give myself a social media break and begrudgingly deleted my Facebook and deactivated my multiple Instagram accounts.

Odell’s idea of productivity consisting of the maintenance of what exists instead of just a production of something new was so eye-opening for me. I was so immersed in gaining new information and creating new content on social media, that I wasn’t even looking back at the information I already knew and content I had already created. I was not asking myself if what I already knew was right and authentic because I wasn’t even asking myself if I was doing alright. I spent my social media break (which is still ongoing) journaling, listening to music, walking outdoors, and mostly studying. It made me realize how using phones is such a huge part of social situations. Sometimes when I sit around with my friends, I find them silently scrolling through their phones for minutes on end. I only recently noticed this because I used to do the same. Scrolling through social media is genuinely such an easy distraction and life has not been the easiest without it. However, I’m really grateful that I caught myself in a toxic spiral and took action at such a young age. This social media break is one of the healthiest things I’ve done in a while.