The Hidden Cost of Social Media

It has become increasingly difficult to find a job that doesn’t demand an advanced understanding of social media. The reality of being a social media manager is as follows.

Create a baseline assessment of where the company is at / immediately start curating content / content that preferably is successful / viral content only / organize and facilitate where your content is coming from and how it is going out / post 3 times / 5 times / 10 times a day / Make sure you’re posting on every platform / consistency is key / save 8 final drafts to send to the same person who asked for 8 different corrections / once it’s finalize don’t feel like you’re behind / go get a coffee / try to shut off / can’t shut off / sit at your computer for hours / clock in and out every day / all day long.

Although it sounds chaotic and dramatic, the reality of being a social media manager is you must produce results. That is your job. It can be a fun and creative job to be in, but the consequences may be more extreme then we’re aware of.

Our phone numbers, email addresses, locations, and more are used as compensation for full access to these platforms and people are doing and not doing what they feel is necessary to protect their private information. The U.S. Census Bureau’s Report on Computer and Internet Use jumped from 54% to 94% of households have access to internet use and had multiple devices in their household. The more dependent we become on social media the more our privacy and freedom become more and more insecure.

When writing Discipline and Punish Micheal Foucault – a French philosopher, writer, political activist, and literary critic – wrote about the relationship between power and knowledge. He went as far as to talk about how we are a society under constant surveillance.

“Our society is not one of spectacle but of surveillance. Under the surface of images, one invests bodies in depth; behind the great abstraction of exchange, there continues the meticulous concrete training of useful forces; the circuits of communication are the supports of an accumulation and a centralization of knowledge…”

This book was published in 1975. 22 years, before the first true social media platform was launched. Foucault continues to write about this world of surveillance and lack of power by talking about the individual itself.

“…The play of signs defines the anchorage of power; It is not that the beautiful totality of the individual is amputated, repressed, altered by our social order, it is rather that the individual is carefully fabricated in it, according to a whole technique of forces and bodies.”

pg. 217

When applying these concepts to how much social media has grown, and our increasing dependence on social media, it becomes more and more evident just how influences our identities, information, and daily actives can be. You’d assume our democracy would be able to combat the consequences of the Internet yet Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, and LinkedIn are all social platforms that had faced lawsuits for validating privacy laws in the U.S. and there is still little to know regulation around what each company can do with our private data.

There are many people who have created social media accounts, and removed them a few years later due to the alarming rate at which our data is being sold. Some are taking the active lawsuits as a sign to stay away.

After talking to aspiring lawyer and current NCAA division II wrestler, Luke A. Hauser, about the impact social media has had on his life his opened up about his decision to ditch the smart phone entirely and rely on a flip phone.

• Did you have social media? If yes, which ones did you have?

For three years in high school (freshman through junior year), I used Snapchat and Instagram.

• How long has it been since you’ve been on social media?

It has been about 4 years since I’ve had a social media account.

• Did you notice any changes within your friendships and relationships once you got rid of social media and your smartphone?

Deleting social media had a swift and profound impact on my friendships and relationships. The immediate consequences were overwhelmingly positive. The quality of time spent with my friends and family improved precipitously. My friend group was altered for the better. I tailored my social life to foster meaningful relations rather than the illusion of connection presented by a snap score.

• Did not having social media and smartphones improve your quality of life? How so?

The absence of social media and a smartphone in my life transcends improvement. I have my life back. To be perpetually enthralled in a two-dimensional screen is not a diminished mode of life, rather, it is to not live at all. People ask me if I get bored without a smartphone, and I can’t help but chuckle. It is precisely on the contrary. Due to the absence of a smartphone, I find enjoyment in what most people would consider mundane, trivial tasks. Walking to class, I notice birds chirping and I marvel at the smell of the trees, I appreciate the formation of the clouds, I attempt to greet people who are walking in the opposite direction but find that they cannot see me because they are looking down. In this way, it sucks. I began noticing how often people use their phones. That is all the time.

In quantifiable terms, I sleep better, I can focus for longer periods of time, my mood has drastically improved, and I am infinitely more productive (It is physically impossible for me to do homework while snap chatting someone or mindlessly scrolling through Instagram, YouTube).

• Not having social media is one thing but choosing to use a flip phone in your twenties is another. What urged you to get a flip phone?

During my freshman year of college, I got rid of my iPhone due to the suspicion that I was wasting countless hours of my life that I could never get back. For a brief period (roughly two weeks), I had no phone at all. This proved challenging, as I missed speaking with my family, and I had no way to contact friends. I asked myself, how could I enjoy the useful conveniences of a cellphone without succumbing to the prison of the two-dimensional smartphone screen? The answer came in the form of an indestructible brick, a flip phone. The flip phone was the perfect compromise because it could perform only two tasks reliably: calling and texting. This became the extent of my cellphone usage. The beauty of the flip phone lies in the difficulty of using it. I could not waste hours texting people, as this would be an excruciating thumb exercise. Nor could I sacrifice good sleep for hours of YouTube as the screen is comprised of approximately three pixels.

• Do feel like you ever lack opportunities to network due to not having an online presence?

No, I never feel like I lack opportunities to network due to not having a presence online. Again, it is exactly the opposite. My lack of social media serves as a filter for my relationships. The people who appreciate my refusal to participate in a virtual world are precisely the kind of people who get along well with me. Moreover, it has been my experience that speaking with people in person has a much more powerful effect with regard to networking than, say, a friend request on LinkedIn.

• Was privacy ever a concern for you when using social media?

Being a bird-brain teenager, I never considered privacy to be an issue while snap chatting people.

• Do you see any benefits to using a smartphone and having social media?

No.

It is more than obvious how much our smartphones have become apart of our lives. Digital calendars, to-do lists, calls, etc. are some of the ways we rely on our smartphones to keep our lives organized. However, the question stands — to what extent?

A study conducted by Victoria I. Marín, Jeffrey P. Carpenter, and Gemma Tur Study shows how little time people spend educated ourselves on privacy policies. Their study included 148 pre-service teachers averaging at the age of 22. They answered an online survey that asked them questions about privacy policies.

Results when asked about awareness and beliefs regarding government data privacy policies…

We are uncomfortable with the way these companies use our data, but we quite frankly have no idea how they are being used. The Cambridge-Facebook scandal was arguably one of the first things to bring our attention to the issue, but what has happened since then?

Privacy online is a growing issue. Legislation is struggling to keep up with the rapid rate technology is growing, and the harder it gets the more these companies are able to get away with it.

There are a few petitions below that I found worth signing in order to act against various issues on social media. Thank you for taking the time to read this article!

1. Mark Zuckerberg, please tell FB to stop giving animal advocates such a hard time (11k+ supporters) – https://chng.it/WvQwcqJHKW  
2. Ask Facebook and Twitter to remove hateful, Islamophobic content on their platforms (32k+ supporters) – https://www.change.org/p/twitter-inc-ask-facebook-and-twitter-to-remove-hateful-islamophobic-content-on-their-platforms-28ff6fbc-67aa-490b-beba-57a4a8989ae8?source_location=topic_page  
3. Remove Holocaust Denial Pages from Facebook –https://chng.it/n8zdQ5CQyh      

Sources Used:

1. Foucault, Micheal. Discipline and Punish. Vol. 1, 1975.
2. Marín, Victoria I., et al. “Pre‐service Teachers’ Perceptions of Social Media Data Privacy Policies.” British Journal of Educational Technology, vol. 52, no. 2, Mar. 2021, pp. 519–35.