Social media – Would you give up Whatsapp?

Greetings addicts,

I’m a big fan of the Guardian and I subscribe to their daily email newsletter. If you ignore the obligatory melodramatic headlines complaining about Trump, Theresa May, North Korea etc etc, there are often a few interesting lifestyle articles to be found.

Last week I was intrigued by the title of this article:

I deleted WhatsApp for a year and here's what I learned

It’s not a new idea. Giving up social media is one of modern society’s favourite self-righteous, soap-box undertakings, with a myriad of underlying reasons including:

• reassuring yourself that you’re not addicted to social media
• proving (to everyone, including perhaps yourself?) that you still have a life outside of social media
• giving everyone else who still uses social media time to miss you so that when you decide to eat humble pie and return to the platform in question you get lots of nice comments and likes
• Renouncing one form of social media (eg Facebook) only to be caught up in another (eg: Instagram), thus inadvertently proving yourself a hypocrite
• freeing up more time (and assumedly increasing your productivity) for things you are truly passionate about, only to find that the practice and promotion of those very things in the most effective way involve the use of social media

… and the list goes on.

Social media is an inescapable part of our lives nowadays, as Knut Traisbach, the author of the article I’ve linked above, was eventually forced to admit. He gave up Whatsapp partly as a social experiment and partly out of stubbornness and mistrust of the app’s link to the ever-growing, data-gobbling Facebook.

But as time went on, he had to admit that he was missing out. And it wasn’t just about feeling left out of social interaction with friends. He was also missing real and valuable information from groups – such as notifications about homework and activities that were shared in Whatsapp groups run by the schools his children attended. In the latter case, he was forced to rely on his wife, who was still using Whatsapp, to pass on the information to him.

You have to ask yourself: if you’re still using the service indirectly, by asking another user to forward messages and information to you, isn’t that the same thing as using it yourself?

I think so. And apparently so did Knut Traisbach, who eventually went back to using the app.

Now, I’m the last person to advocate giving up social media. I happily admit to being an addict. (And now that I’ve discovered Steemit, the situation can only get worse...)

But my view is that social media is now a part of the world we live in. Whether you like it or not, you have to accept it. Trying to deny it or avoid it is like trying to ignore any major innovation or discovery in human history – utterly futile.

I don’t pretend that social media is all good or totally beneficial for human society. Of course it has its flaws and downsides. The point is that it's here to stay and it’s kind of pointless to do anything other than accept the fact and manage your interaction with social media based on your preferences.

Old phones with a round dial. Remember those? Source: Pixabay

I’m sure that some people originally objected to the invention of the telephone. Perhaps some even refused to have a telephone in their home because of fears of being overheard and recorded by governments, spies, criminals etc. But eventually the convenience of immediate contact outweighed those concerns, until nowadays you would think someone wasn’t quite right in the head if they refused to have a phone because of fears of being overheard.

My argument is that social media will eventually be viewed in the same way. And like the telephone, there will be people who like the service and use it a lot, and other people who only use it the bare minimum enough to get by. But I predict that a time will come when it will be difficult to cope in life without having an account on the most major social media platforms.

Of course, I’m preaching to the choir here, as through the very act of reading this article you are revealing yourself as a converted social media user. But are there any other viewpoints out there?

Is any form of social media better or worse than others?

Have you ever tried giving up a certain platform for a period of time?

How did it work out?

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Thank you for reading! This is an original post created for Steemit by @Victoria-Kelly
Read more: find my rant about the overuse of GIFs here