My personal social media experiment inspired me to re-evaluate my social life. I had a social problem – one that I think many struggle with as well. I had too many friendships to manage. In pre-social media times an abundance of friendships was manageable – you call each other, you hang out, you talk, simple. But post-social media negatively affected my social life because it took away from that simplicity.
Here’s Why.
Time Is Limited
Social media simply provided more relationships to manage and time just stayed the same. There were my “true” friends – people I know in “real life’ and see or talk to with my voice. Then, depending on which platform, there were the hundreds of other relationships to manage.
Facebook was first day of school pics to like, groups to manage, and vacation photos to “ooh” and “awe” at. Instagram was the “like for a like” dance – a composite of 1+ hours a day – making sure not to leave anyone out. And we can’t forget the time consuming preparation of photos and captions for displaying our lives to our audience of “friends”.
Research has shown that we have a limit to how many relationships we can maintain. It’s called Dunbar’s Number and it’s explained here. Add in the new “need” to maintain social media friendships and it puts us way over our friendship limits.
If we’re busy putting in the effort, however minimal, to “like” and comment and interact with an ever-widening network, we have less time and capacity left for our closer groups.”
Maria Konnikova, The New Yorker
When I put too many eggs in my virtual basket, my “real life” friendships suffered. I used to spend time interacting with people I don’t even know at the cost of time with my close friends and family.
Communicating with Friends Online Replaced Our Intimate Interactions
How did I go two years without seeing my high school best friend? Its because we both allowed the exchange of a couple of likes on social media to act as though we were interacting.
There was the assumption because I was posting to the masses online I was also nurturing relationships with my “real life” friends. It created the illusion that I was acting as a good friend should.
Social Media Made Me See Some Friends Differently
Social media ruined the quality of my friendships when what I saw on the newsfeed complicated my feelings towards someone. Some posts (be it divisive topics or just the observation of a false persona) made me re-think how I felt about some friends.
I thought I was alone in thinking this way. This sense that I liked someone just fine in person, but who they were online was someone I didn’t particularly jive with. Then, I came across others who feel this way too. With a Google search I found: When You Love Your Friend But Hate Her Social Media Presence. I didn’t even need to read the article to commiserate.
The Distraction of the Social Media “Audience”
Does social media negatively affect our social lives because we stop short of creating quality friendships because we believe our “followers” are our friends? What if the surface interactions online make us forget we even need them in “real life”? The platforms seem to make us believe in quantity over quality when it comes to friends.
For me, the noise from those who wouldn’t have been in my life had I not “friended” them online was far too distracting. In “real life” we limit who we interact with. Online, we create and manage a public audience. We “friend” individuals who are toxic to our well-being without a thought. We let them give us feedback about what we post.
Managing friends in a public atmosphere spread me too thin both physically and emotionally. I wasted the energy that should’ve gone to my loved ones, worrying about what these supposed friends thought of “online me”.
More and more I find myself yearning to go back to my 90s self, where rushing home to see whose call I missed, doesn’t sound so bad right now.