This summer, I went hiking in Norway. In the wilderness of the mountains, where leisure time was defined by sharing stories with my friends, reading a book until nightfall, or watching the clouds sailing silently above the soaring peaks of Trollheimen, it all became so clear.
This is all I need, I thought, and I imagined all the people, books, and clouds awaiting me back in Edinburgh. Life will be different when I get back. I’ll need no Netflix. I’ll need no junk food. And I’ll absolutely need no Facebook.
Upon my return to life under a ceiling, of course, I immediately returned to Netflix and junk food. But with Facebook and other social media, I managed to restrain myself. I started cutting down my bloated Facebook and Twitter accounts, purging my Twitter feed, unliking pages, untagging photos, and unfriending people I barely knew or enjoyed the company of. I limited my usage of social media to monitoring news, organising meet-ups, and only sharing stories that I felt truly, urgently needed sharing. And I felt all the better for it.
But over the last few months, the addictive nature of social media has regained ground, insidiously creeping back into my life to a potentially harmful degree. Facebook is incredibly useful, don’t get me wrong. Indeed, the idea of Facebook, of remaining connected to the people one knows and cares about and easily speaking to them, laughing with them, debating with them in a seamless virtual environment is a staggeringly wonderful one.
However, Facebook is a corporate project, constructed with consumption in mind. As memories of Norway and the freedom of its wild places become less vivid, I increasingly go online, not outdoors or into a book, for my down-time. Like 90 per cent of other under-30s, my phone often lies beside my bed, always on, always connected. I scroll through my news feed before sleeping and upon waking. Waiting for lectures to start or friends to arrive, I instinctively take out my phone and surf through Facebook.
And if this really gives you pleasure, good, so be it. The Guardian’s Suzanne Moore argued recently that gloating about not having a Facebook profile is dismissive of the people who take real happiness out of the services Facebook provides.
But another Guardian piece, this time a video by Tom Chatfield, argues that ‘your phone is seducing you’. He points out that “Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are casinos. Your time is their money. Just one more click. Another like. Another link.” In a similar vein, Danish researchers recently found that time apart from Facebook left participants in their study happier and more productive.
Moore would reply to this, saying:
“These sorts of studies strike me as self-satisfied. Sure, take a break. A social media detox. Drink your Nutribullet green gunge instead of photographing it. Help the old lady next door. Have some spiritual connection instead of joking with friends who aren’t even ‘real’ online. After all, you have free choice over these free apps. If you are ‘addicted’ and can no longer function, work or have relationships, then there is a problem. But this addiction model is questionable. Are we addicted to televison, reading, music? Why is chatting so bad? Why is having so much access to so much information dangerous? I can sit with the same old friend and have the same old conversation, or I can play with new people who tell me new things. Both are real. Both can be brilliant.”
And she has a very credible point. Engagement with social media is a personal choice. I choose to step away from it. Others choose to make the most of it. And I would leave it at that – If not for recent, shockingly eye-opening events.
Since the tragedy in Paris (13 Nov), my Facebook feed has turned from a benign and sleep-stealing distraction, to an insulting, upsetting, and vicious arena of hate. And it is not the xenophobic far-right who are the culprits (As horrific as their reaction has been), but well-meaning friends, usually on the political left, getting sucked into the social media whirlpool.
One of the first Facebook reactions to the Paris attacks I read, after the first wave of live feeds and news sites, was a condemnation of the lack of similar coverage for the horrendous terrorist attack in Beirut the day before. (12 Nov) While it is fair to bring up the relative lack of attention the Beirut attack, which killed 43 and injured about 250, received, the argument that developed out of those initial reactions over the following days became increasingly aggressive. Arguments for increased discussion of events in Beirut turned into barbed attacks on the many Facebook-users, myself included, who filtered their profile picture with the colours of the French tricolour. Accusations of narrow-mindedness, ignorance, and even racism flew, and a simple online act of solidarity became heavily and divisively politicised.
These arguments eventually received counter-arguments, which insisted that promoting the French flag was not dismissive of Beirut and other acts of terrorism around the world, and that people are capable of thinking about more than one thing at once, even if their Facebook wall does not display this. But these counters simply perpetuated the toxic debate, which grew more hysterical day by day as people drew further into their own Facebook bubbles.
The turning point for me, the point at which I realised the real damage caused by trends and likes, was when people started sharing stories of an attack on Garissa University in Kenya, in which 147 people were killed. It became the most read article on the BBC News website. It was shared across social media in a flood, many users declaring the scale of the tragedy and yelling “shame” at the terrible, awful people whose profile pictures still displayed the tricolour.
The Kenyan attack was from April. It was tragic then. It is tragic now. It should never be forgotten. But it was still from April.
The people who spread the Garissa attack across social media infuriated me for one of two reasons. Either, the sharer did not notice that the story was from April (As seems to have been the case in a great many examples), or the sharer did know and was simply bringing it back to condemn those still prioritising the grieving of Paris.
If the sharer did not know, then they should start actually reading the articles they are sharing. The date was clearly displayed. Those sharing it had either not been aware of the awful story in April (Which was, by the way, quite extensively covered), or did not care enough to remember it. To try to shame others when you yourself are only motivated by a desperate scramble for Facebook likes and weeping emoticons is, in my view, hugely disrespectful and quite disgusting.
And if the sharer did know that the story was from April, then they should consider the many thousands of people who have died or suffered at the hands of IS/Daesh and other terrorist groups in the meantime. To unthinkingly select the Garissa attack as a token example of ‘racist reporting’ is dismissive and insulting, not only to Kenyans, but to the entire world. It is self-righteousness, an attempt to establish moral superiority, in selectively targeting an old story and dragging it into the present for one’s own needs.
As a recent Scotsman article by Martyn McLaughlin put it, “Bemoaning the low profile of a story is a valid complaint, given the way the power of the media can shape public perspectives and inform government policy. This, however, was not the motive at play. The virtue signalling of [English actor and comedian Jack] Jones and others like him – described by the American writer, Jamiles Lartey, as ‘tragedy hipsters’ – is typical of the performative response to tragedy now so in vogue. It is a chance to invoke moral equivalency where none exists and shed light on other traumas, days if not months after the media have already done so.”
The article also highlights another issue that many viciously vocal Facebook users have unwittingly been swept up by – that their news sources are the problem, not general coverage of a non-Western disaster. It is easy but wrong to condemn journalists and the “Western media” (A generalising term for thousands of news outlets, all with varying emphases, values, qualities, and political alignments) when your own selectively chosen Facebook feed displays your own selectively chosen news stories.
It is time now to remove ourselves from the Facebook debates and look at what has happened in the time that we have spent being consumed by messy, inconsistent, ill-informed arguments on media coverage and how to grieve on a public, online platforms: France, Russia and the US have gone to war against IS/Daesh. Paris and Beirut are still coming to terms with the scale of the horribly real disaster they have just experienced. Europe has gone into high alert.
And here we are, trapped in an unreal bubble, virtually shouting at each other over an insubstantial blue-and-white field when we should be learning, preparing, and, if we feel the need to, grieving.
I, for one, am going to be stepping back from that unaware, self-obsessed, vicious place for a while, using Facebook sparingly while the hatred and shame ripple on into the ether. Social media may profit from our obsessive online raging, but after a certain amount of hastily-typed sentences, our minds and societies do not.
Tonight I will be turning off my phone. The last thing that I see before sleep takes me will not be a blazing, endless white screen. It will be the images in my head, projected against the ceiling – transporting me somewhere real. Somewhere wonderful, like the wilds of Norway. Or somewhere terrible, like the bombed-out ruins of Raqqa.
Image credit: Aol.
Ishneich 
