As a child of the ’70s my first experience of the internet wasn’t until 1998 – my third year of university. My flatmates and I had ventured to the computer room – a mythical space full of green screened monstrosities and people way more intelligent than us – to email our landlords in Canada begging them to let us renew our lease. My brainiest pal had managed to get us an email address – a lengthy combination of random letters and numbers – and we set about composing a message which would somehow navigate its way across the Atlantic via the information superhighway. My mind was blown.
The following year I started my first proper grown up job and with it came my very own email address. Although as a general dogsbody in an auction house, I had very little call to use it. My subsequent job at a newspaper required rather a lot more screen time and it was here that I had my first experience of a rudimentary form of social media – the online gossip fest that was ‘Popbitch’. I was also fascinated by the bizarre web page permanently on display on my colleagues’s desktop – a plain white screen emblazoned with primary coloured letters spelling out ‘Google’.
But it wasn’t until quite a few years later, 2007 to be exact, that I first danced with the devil and signed up to the social network that was to take over the world – Facebook. I remember my friend Ben telling me I had to sign up, that it was ‘the future’. I thought it was a fad. But slowly, slowly, I found myself sneakily looking at it in the office on my lunch break, thrilled when I received another friend request. I didn’t have a computer at home and still had my trusty Nokia 3310, so these lunchtime sessions were my daily fix. In 2009 I got my first iPhone; without doubt its main selling point to me was that it had a Facebook app – I could indulge my new found need to look at random people’s holiday photos and stalk ex boyfriends at the mere touch of a screen.
As the years racked up, it’s fair to say that Facebook became like crack cocaine to me. I have over-shared, posted way too many baby photographs and left cryptic messages when I’ve been feeling low in the hope that someone would ask me if I was ok . I have met total strangers for the first time and had to pretend that I didn’t know who they were, even though I had spent a good half hour trawling through their profile and knew that they’d had a great holiday in Majorca and just got a puppy.
The positives are that it has put me back in contact with people I’ve lost touch with through the years, giving me a way to retain connections in our fast paced world. It proved a vital lifeline during the early months of motherhood when I knew that no matter what ungodly hour I was up, I could find another one of my antenatal group mums in the same position. We shared fears, milestones and anecdotes and there was something hugely comforting about getting an instant response at 3am.
But despite this, over the last few years I’ve slowly fallen out of love with Facebook. I have no doubt that a recent dalliance with anxiety was fuelled by it. As I scrolled endlessly through my feed I couldn’t help but compare and despair. To me everyone else was having more fun, had cooler clothes and better hair. ‘Ignorance is bliss’ doesn’t exist in Facebook world. If I didn’t get invited to a social occasion my NFI status would be rubbed in my face as soon as I logged on and instead of doing ‘something less boring instead’ (anyone else remember Why Don’t You?) I couldn’t help but look at the photos or read the status updates. It was like self harming by social media.
My precious sleep was also suffering. Climbing into bed at the end of the day, instead of reading a book or even acknowledging my husband, I would click on the bright blue square for another quick fix and before I knew it, it was midnight and apart from getting 100 per cent on a quiz about Dirty Dancing, my life had not been enriched in any way. I found myself expending valuable energy getting worked up about some issue or comment in one of the many groups I was a member of. I was becoming less and less present in the world and more a slave to my news feed.
I knew I needed to exercise some Facebook self control but couldn’t quite make the break. In the end all it took was a casual conversation with a dear friend. I was feeling crap one Monday morning after a particularly bad weekend of comparing and despairing and she uttered the magic words, ‘why don’t you just delete the app from your phone?’ For some reason that morning I had the strength and right there and then I did it. I pressed the shaky little x at the top lefthand corner of the magical blue square and instead of the world exploding, I felt empowered, relieved, free.
In the weeks since I’ve caught myself, phone in hand, searching for an app that’s no longer there. Mindlessly scrolling had become a reflex for me, I wasn’t even aware I was doing it. My precious time was being sucked into a black hole of personality quizzes and status updates from people I barely knew. I can still log in the old fashioned way if I feel the need and I have checked my notifications to see what I’ve been missing out on but unsurprisingly there has been nothing earth shattering.
I should however admit that whilst Facebook has bitten the dust, I’m not quite ready to break up with Instagram. As my love for the former began to wane, I began a flirtation with the latter that has turned into a full blown love affair. I’m probably just replacing one addiction with another but Instagram feels different to me. It’s more anonymous, more creative, more inspiring. Of course it’s still edited highlights but somehow it doesn’t fuel my anxiety in quite the same way as Facebook. It still allows me to connect with the wider world but in a way that feels more comfortable to me. Instead of scrolling through random holiday photos or getting embroiled in the latest village scandal, I’m getting inspiration on amazing food to cook for my family, exciting places to visit or spying an awesome pair of earrings.
Social media is now part of our world whether we like it or not. I’m definitely not turning my back on it but rather setting some boundaries and exercising some self control. Keeping connections with the people I want to and disregarding the rest and so far, it feels good.
Postcards From My Kitchen Table 