Your Brain On Media
Selfishness is the new brand in America, marketed as independence. We’re all guilty of it. Some more than others. The platform for it? Instagram. Facebook first but a platform with followers? It’s set up to worship. To worship gods of illusion. Although the money made from those gods of illusion is very real. That’s the kicker.
I shy away from IG, with just 200 followers, people whom I know, I don’t really approve people I don’t. I post my life and I value privacy. Why do I need to have someone knowing my every move? So I can start to make money on the platform from brand deals? Partnering with products and trying to sell them to you and selling my privacy with them? Always thinking about taking a picture no matter where I am because I have to have ‘content’? Disrupting an experience, not being fully present because I’m always thinking of what to take a picture of? Or where the best lighting is? Or taking multiple photos and videos to make sure I have just the right one? And where does that experience go? Are we physically there but not mentally or emotionally present? What does that do to our memories and the meaning in our lives? Do we ascribe meaning to things and events that didn’t truly mean much to us?
Now that we’ve had IG for a few years, aren’t peoples’ stories and everyday lives getting old? I find myself not that interested anymore…the curtain has been ripped away and I see the narcissism and desperation behind the posts. Frankly I’m turned off. I stopped following a lot of people, because I was bored with their content, found them desperate or superficial or didn’t want unnecessary vacant advertising in my feed, however impossible. This platform is an advertiser’s dream. Ads from your favorite people, marketed directly to you, and we’re asking for it by following. We’re all addicted to scrolling. Let’s see what my favorite person is up to…and now we just scroll through vaguely layered advertising all day every day.
Sure, we see what our favorite celebrities and our friends and family are up to, but at what cost? At the cost of our mind space being taken up and consumed by people outside us for a profit. We are always connected, online, we don’t want to miss out and therefore we are allowing what others want us to see to infiltrate our brains and take control. When do we think our own thoughts? When we’re not moving from our phone screen to TV screen to Macbook back to our phone screen? When we’re not listening to the radio or podcasts or Sirius XM on our drives? Don’t get me wrong, I love podcasts but we always have some media filtering in and invading our space, until we are spouting things that are not our own thoughts, our originals, until we’re dreaming about people on IG, in movies or in the news.
Don’t get me started on the news, a fear-mongering machine meant to distract by stirring up fear and keeping your attention the longest. Remember when CNN was respected? But they had to cover Kim K in order to keep up and grab attention and that was the beginning of the end. Not to mention the current climate and alternative facts, but I digress.
I’m an influencer you say. I influence your mind, I’m not the follower. Are you on IG all day every day? Posting and thinking about what to post, what to write, hashtags? Are you always taking pictures at events so much so that you don’t enjoy most of them? Or you think you do but then you get home and wake up the next day and feel kind of empty? Are you constantly comparing what you do to what other influencers do to make sure you stay relevant? Then your mind space is not yours.
Because the addiction runs deep, and I’m not faulting you, I’m at fault too. This thing is seductive. It’s designed to be. The solution? Use the new iPhone feature to limit your time on specific apps, delete the app and take a week or two off and make your breaks longer every time, create something in the time you would use for social media, or read a book, talk to someone you love. And if you have to, instead of following regular people or influencers, start following artist sites, museums, musicians, NASA, psychologists, spiritual thinkers, writers, journalists, scientists, travel sites or whatever else you’re interested in. That’s what I do. Because I want to learn instead of compare and the headspace I get from deleting the app every so often makes me feel more connected to myself.
I wonder, what we will become. What’s next? What comes after IG? Will youth go the other way and value privacy? What’s the next frontier? And how will we cope if our brains are addicted to non-stop pretty emptiness?
