My History of Social Media and Phone Use

A few months ago I listened to a New York Times podcast episode about a young woman in high school who started a club called The Luddite Club. She started the club because she was checking and posting on social media apps to keep up with her peers, but her mental health and self-esteem suffered because she was always comparing herself with her peers and got overwhelmed, especially when kids had to go to school online during the pandemic. She decided to give up her smartphone, and she started a club at school for kids who also wanted to use their smartphones less, and she called it the Luddite Club. Even though people gave her a lot of criticism for it, she tells the interviewer that she felt more at peace with herself and more present in her life when she wasn’t on her phone all the time. She did say it was really hard at first though because she had invented this persona on these social media apps about who she was, and she earned a lot of approval from her peer group, but then when she no longer used social media her peers no longer gave her that approval. If you get a chance to listen to this episode it is really good:

I’ve gotta admit: growing up I was a huge Luddite. I didn’t get my first smartphone until I was around 22. Up until then I had a flip phone and I didn’t even get that until I was 16. Before that I was always asking my teachers and fellow students if I could use their phone. The teachers had landlines but my fellow students had cell phones. At the time I just didn’t really care about getting one because it didn’t seem like a big deal. I could just use my teacher’s landline to call my parents if I needed to stay after school or needed to be picked up. When I was in the 5th grade my dad got me my first laptop, a silver Dell computer. I didn’t use it the first couple of weeks, but he encouraged me to use it more often. I ended up spending my entire seventh grade year battling an Internet addiction. I would be on YouTube constantly and because I was spending more time online than spending time studying, I suffered academically. My grades plummeted and I developed terrible self-esteem. I was irritable and upset with everyone in my environment. I had really low self-esteem. I don’t think technology was the only cause of my depression of course, but it played a pretty huge role in my life because I often isolated in my bedroom staying up late on YouTube and procrastinating on my homework assignments. Then in the summer before eighth grade, I traveled abroad and my dad got me a Nokia phone for international calls. There was a girl on the trip who I became good friends with and she asked to use my phone every day to call her family. As much as I complained to her about using my phone all the time, I think I had every reason to let her use my phone because I had used people’s phones so many times when I didn’t have my own phone. When I went to India for three weeks, my dad got me my first smartphone. I only used it to call my parents during the trip, but funny enough the place we stayed at didn’t have much cell reception so I ended up not calling my parents. But somehow this was a blessing in disguise because I was able to be fully present on the trip. I did take a lot of pictures with the phone though, so that was probably another good thing about having that smartphone.

Whenever I check my smartphone I do it whenever I am feeling lonely, bored or anxious. These past few weeks I kept checking my phone to see if one of my friends texted and it was agonizing, dealing with my own impatience. I wish I could just let him live his life. In the summer of 2016 I went on a program for philosophy students, and on the final day I was leaving my dorm to go downstairs to drop off my key at the front desk, and I was texting my parents to let them know I was going downstairs. I had my two suitcases and my backpack, lugging it all down the stairs while trying to fumble around with the digital keyboard on my phone. Because I was so used to dropping my flip phone and not breaking it, I was so horrified when I realized smartphones don’t get those kinds of easy second chances and can break in a heartbeat. So I tripped and fell. And crash went my phone on the steps before dying a quick painful death. I broke down in tears at the airport. How could I have been so stupid, so careless?!? I chanted Nam-myoho-renge-kyo until the flight attendant snapped me out of my self-pity and told me the plane was leaving. Oh gosh, I thought, another stupid thing I did that proves how stupid I am! I cried the whole flight home. It was an overnight flight with a layover in Chicago O’Hare. I dragged my defeated self through the O’Hare airport. There were a lot of cancellations and I wasn’t going to make it back in time. I got out my laptop and put in the little SD card from my phone, hoping that I could revive the little baby by transferring my files. All my pictures, videos, shared memories…

Gone. Vamos. Nada. Dead.

I spiraled further into a painful panic. What if this happens to me later in life? What if my kids get stuck at the airport overnight and they can’t text me because they broke their smartphones while walking down steps? I bought myself some snacks at an expensive looking boutique and finally caught a flight back home. When I arrived, it’s no surprise that my family freaked. I apologized but my empty apologies got lost in a sea of “We thought you died!” I remember stewing in guilt and shame all throughout the ride home and well after that. I went to the phone store with my dad and the salesperson told me, after I held out one last ounce of hope that my dumb mistake of texting, while walking down stairs, could be forgiven, that I needed to get a new phone and that there was no hope of reviving the broken smartphone. I was angry with myself, but I needed a phone to stay in touch with people so I returned to my old flip phone days and got a little red flip phone before finally getting a new smartphone. I definitely noticed the differences. With my flip phone I didn’t have tons of apps and notifications to distract me but I also couldn’t take selfies big enough for viewing purposes and it took me more patience to type text messages, whereas with a smartphone I can send a long winded text in under a minute because my fingers have gotten used to texting a lot. Yet with my flip phone I didn’t have YouTube or apps to distract me, but with my smartphone I could listen to YouTube music at work or show my coworkers a funny video, and join multiple texting groups like GroupMe and WhatsApp to get updates on events I wanted to attend.

I don’t have lots of social media accounts either. During my high school years many of my peers used Facebook but I didn’t. So when I graduated and was saying goodbye to everyone, a lot of people asked if I was on Facebook and I told them casually that I wasn’t. It really didn’t seem like a big deal. But then in college I got mixed responses to not having Facebook. Some people respected my decision to not use the site, but others gave me side eyes. After having a nice conversation with one of my classmates, she told me, “We should stay in touch!” And then asked the inevitable question:

Are you on Facebook?”

“Oh no, I’m not,” I said without hesitation, laughing because I was so used to getting this question. She gave me a side eye, like “Are you kidding me? Girl, keep up with the times!” And then another time, I was waiting for a professor’s class to start and I and a couple of other students were waiting in the hallway and talking and somehow Facebook popped up in the conversation, and I casually mentioned, “I don’t have Facebook.”

“You don’t have Facebook?” they laughed.

I didn’t really think it was a big deal. But when I took a college course over the summer in 2013, it was a huge deal for the program coordinator, who insisted throughout the program that I should get a Facebook. Even after I left the program, I emailed her to check in and she said, “It’s great hearing from you. If you are now on Facebook I will add you to our group.” I felt bad but I still didn’t want to get a Facebook account because of privacy concerns (then again, that statement is ironic because I ended up getting Facebook later on) and because I worried it would get in the way of my studies. I told people on the program I didn’t have Facebook; interestingly enough I later found other people who didn’t use Facebook, like one of my classmates and a cello instructor at a camp I went to. Some people told me that I didn’t have to put my full name or a photo of me on my profile and one of the young ladies in the class said that she had a fake name and a profile photo that didn’t show her face. I insisted though that I didn’t want to get one, and gave everyone my email. I went on that entire year to email this one guy in the class and then obsess and cry and complain to my friends and family how he never emailed me back. I had gotten an email response from a couple of people, but I spent the year feeling like I made a bad decision by not getting a Facebook because no one had emailed me back. I scribbled my complaints in my journal every evening about how upset I was for not getting a response. Looking back, I probably could have given those kids more grace.

“Then just get a Facebook,” my friend told me one time at dinner. But in my mind, I couldn’t just get a Facebook. Somehow, not having a Facebook felt freeing. Plus I saw people on campus all the time. It was only when my boyfriend at the time persuaded me to stay in touch with him over Facebook that I actually got one. I remember being at lunch with some friends and they were so proud of me and saying, “Yay! You finally got Facebook” as if it was a monumental achievement akin to getting married or landing a dream job. I was glad that people were happy with me, but I still felt lonely. I struggled to feel as if I was making a genuine connection with the friends and acquaintances I followed on Facebook. When I posted things, I had this naïve idea that I was going to get thousands of likes and people were going to engage with my posts because I saw that on a lot of my other friends’ posts. But that wasn’t the case, and it dealt a really horrible blow to my self-esteem, so I deleted my account. Then time passed and I got a new one, then deleted that one. Every time there was a privacy concern with the social network (Cambridge Analytica was a major one) I freaked out and deleted my account. I found out that no one really noticed that I left, and even my boyfriend assumed I had left because of Cambridge Analytica (which I did.) But I found out that even though I got Facebook only to keep in touch with him, we lost touch after a couple of years and he stopped responding to my messages. I did get upset with him, but by this time I was so busy with work and my SGI activities that even though I hadn’t moved on completely when he didn’t write back, I had stuff to do. When I didn’t get a lot of likes on my Facebook posts, I felt bad, but then my sister told me it’s because of the Facebook algorithm, which shows posts based on popularity and other complicated metrics. In late 2020 I began to feel lonely and I also started thinking about this girl who I met in my senior year. We didn’t become friends, but I was stuck in quarantine and was bored so I figured I would look up to see how this girl was doing and wanted to see if she wanted to reconnect or would remember me. That definitely didn’t work out. I sent her this long DM about how sweet and kind she was and how I didn’t get to know her that well because I was an introvert. Anyway, the note was long winded and sappy and I was crushed and took it personally when I didn’t get a response. I was stuck in this idea that friendships had to last forever but that experience taught me that I can’t take everything personally and that people don’t respond for various reasons that I may never know about (e.g. they’re busy, they don’t check Facebook anymore, or they’re just not interested in friending you period.)

I also found out that a lot of people didn’t really notice that I had left Facebook for two consecutive years . I befriended many of the same people from college, but again, I ended up using it as a sort of channel to earn approval. Theses people were my friends right? I sent lots of DMs to lots of people so I could be a good friend but weirdly enough getting Facebook didn’t make me feel any less lonely. In fact, by looking at other people’s photos I got even lonelier and developed FOMO. I had hobbies I could continue to pursue like reading, watching movies, cleaning my room, even writing on this here blog. But I think checking Facebook made it hard for me to feel proud of my friends for enjoying their lives. Of course, as I started to talk with more people and read more studies I realized that Facebook (or really any social media) itself isn’t bad. It just depends on how you use it. I am currently reading a book called Together: The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World by Vivek H. Murthy, MD, and in one of the chapters he talks about how he got a Facebook to keep in touch with friends but I found myself resonating with him because he talks about how he didn’t get to have these deep conversations on Facebook and when he posted thoughtful articles he didn’t get likes and often kept checking to see if he got likes on his posts. But he also says Facebook can be used in ways that help foster connection, like this woman who started a group for physicians who were also moms and helped connect so many women who were struggling with their kids and navigating motherhood while working full-time. Writing this reflection made me reflect on my purpose for getting Facebook and has made me want to be more intentional about how I connect with other people on the site. I’m sure I’ll have many more stories to share about my journey with technology though because my journey with tech is always evolving.