20 November 2016

When Social Media Goes Too Far

Last weekend, I went ice skating with two of my best friends in Canary Wharf to celebrate one of their birthdays. It was… terrifying, for the first 20 or 30 minutes, until we got the hang of it and managed to enjoy ourselves. But that’s not quite what this post is about.

For fear of falling arse over head and breaking something, we didn’t take our phones onto the ice. However, a lot of other people did. Skating (barely) around the edges so that we could grab onto the sides, we kept meeting congestion along the way. Mostly, people were going slow, like us, or stopping for a breather. But there was also quite a disturbing amount of people holding the skaters up in a bid to take the perfect selfie, and even getting staff members over to take their group photos – which meant a lot of waiting for clear space. Worse still, for the last 20 minutes of our session there was a group in the middle of the rink only taking selfies.

I get it: it’s an ice rink in central London that’s lit up like a disco and makes a great picture. A big part of me wished it would have been safe enough to bring out my phone and capture some of the laughs we were having or how pretty it looked. But when I thought about it, the reason we were having so much fun is because we didn’t have our phones distracting us. We weren’t trying to take selfies that each of us liked, or snapchat storying the hell out of our skate session, we just skated (or tried to), and laughed a lot at each other’s questionable skating stances or near slips – we just enjoyed the experience.

Photo courtesy of my lovely friend Naomi

Social media is a huge part of most of our lives now; that’s just the way life is going and that’s fine. In fact, social media is great for keeping connected – and reconnected! – with people and current events, or even researching new places to go. For me, as a blogger, I’m forever sharing photos of my food and I’ll admit to checking Instagram a lot. But the idea of setting out to go somewhere or do something just for the sake of an Instagram photo or story, and then not even genuinely experiencing that moment, is actually pretty disturbing.

Is it an expectation? The pressure to look like we’re busy, fun and successful people all the time? Or has this become a habitual obsession? Being able to check in or use customised location filters only fuels the need to show everyone what we’re doing, but where do we draw the line? It’s pretty creepy, but I like that recent episode of Black Mirror may have been getting at a lot more than just satire.