quitting social media essay

What Quitting Social Media Taught Me

I went off social media for a few months. this is what i learned..

Posted October 22, 2021 | Reviewed by Tyler Woods

• I got off social media completely for a few months and it was life-altering.
• I learned how social media pressurizes us into performing our lives for an audience.
• There is often a very real disconnect between what we see on social media and the true lives that people live.
• Being off social media made me not only stop constantly comparing my own life with those of others, but also use my time more productively.

As a '90s kid, I grew up in an era before smartphones and social media. I'm thankful for this for one simple reason—I remember a time before life became performative. I recall actually experiencing every moment I wanted to remember, rather than losing it in favor of recording the moment for posterity. I am also so thankful that I navigated the turbulent teenage years without the additional hurdle of social media and all the pressures that come with it. I am also, for this same reason, concerned about my daughter and other children growing up in this era in which appearances matter so much, and people are put on a pedestal simply based on the number of their social media followers.

It's been almost a year now since my last post on Instagram or Facebook, and almost as long since I even opened them to check posts (I've recently begun checking them occasionally, but not for more than 5 minutes at a time, and not compulsively). I got off the two sites for a simple reason: I was spending too much time on them, and gaining next to nothing in the process (except an unhealthy dose of FOMO, but more on that later).

Just a little caveat before I begin. I am not claiming that social media has no uses whatsoever. It has brought the world closer together and helps people keep in touch. It just ceased to work for me. I was increasingly beginning to feel like the people on my social media were less of friends and more of acquaintances. In fact, I cannot remember the last time I actually had a conversation with most of them. And knowing about each other’s lives simply through each other’s status updates didn’t feel much like a meaningful way of keeping in touch. I have a few friends I am close to, and I started feeling like I don’t really need Instagram or Facebook to keep in touch with them.

I do plan to write about the neuroscience behind social media addiction in future posts, but for now, here's what being off social media taught me:

1. It's terribly hard to get off social media for an extended period of time, but it can be worth it

I had tried before, on multiple occasions, to get off social media but always failed within a day or two. I would be staring at my computer screen, and my resolve would just crumble. This time around, however, something in me hardened. I decided to first delete the apps from my phone, and sign out of them on my laptop. Whenever I felt the temptation to open Instagram and bomb hours scrolling aimlessly, I would open Twitter instead (which has never been as much of an addiction for me, and a forum that has helped immensely, given that I follow people with similar interests and in the same field as myself).

I realized with time that it became easier and easier not to open the websites that I didn’t want to be spending my time on. Best of all, I was not missing it in the least! And after a few months of not opening Instagram, I felt my interest in random strangers' lives just fade away. This was good for several reasons, not least of which was that:

2. Being off social media made me experience lower amounts of FOMO, and an overall higher level of satisfaction and happiness with my own life

As a parent of an unvaccinated toddler in the midst of a pandemic, I found that we were traveling less than the people on my social media feed appeared to be doing. I would constantly compare my own life with that of others who seemed to be having so many more travel experiences, and, of course, end up being less than happy about my own. After all, research suggests that social comparison is one of the primary causes of dissatisfaction in people's lives.

3. I realized much of what people post on social media is performative and has little to nothing to do with how their lives really are.

It's not fair for me to complain that people get on to social media to make their lives look good because that is the nature of the medium. We post only the good parts and not the bad. What I think is really unfortunate, though, is how easy it seems to be for us to forget this fact when we look at other people's posts online. "Ooh, they just had a baby, and bought a new house a year ago, and look at their smiles in this post, they look so happy!" we tend to think. It baffles us when we realize that people's lives aren't as perfect as they make them out to be on Instagram or Facebook. How can there possibly be such a big disconnect between what we see and what actually is, we are led to wonder.

4. I learned the importance of boredom.

While I was on the social media platforms, they became my default go-to whenever I felt myself getting bored, or with extra time on my hands. This would inevitably cure me of my boredom . As soon as I stopped defaulting to scrolling on these, however, I realized that knowing when I am bored (and allowing myself to wallow in the boredom, if you will) is invaluable. It helped me realize that I need to be doing more meaningful things with my time.

5. The less time I spent on social media, the more time I had to do things that really mattered to me.

I have read more books in 2021 than during any other year in my life so far, and it is at least partly because I don’t default to scrolling through social media when I have the time.

6. I make memories less by recording every moment, and more by living it.

I recall when I was on social media the temptation to take one perfect picture wherever we went (even if it was just a trip to the park). "It could be my next display cover image on Facebook", I would think. Or, "This would look so good on Insta!" I’d say, while handing my husband the phone to take the perfect photograph. When I would sing (something I enjoy), I would always be tempted to make a recording of it to share on social media. This would inevitably suck much of the joy out of the experience, and cause me to question my own motivations. Am I doing this to garner appreciation from people who are practically strangers to me, or for my own enjoyment?

All this is not to say that I don’t take pictures or videos anymore, or that I don’t enjoy recording myself singing. I still do all these things, but I feel like I do it more for myself and less for other people. Other people only care so much about where I go, what I do, or what my talents are. I still take lots and lots of pictures and videos of my toddler to share with family, and for my husband and I to look back at years down the line and relive the memories. The removal of social media from the equation makes things much simpler and more meaningful.

As someone who goes and looks at all our old photo albums whenever I visit my parents' home, making and recording memories does matter a lot to me. I'm just glad that I am now making and storing all these memories for myself and my family rather than for my imagined audience online.

Aditi Subramaniam is a neuroscience Ph.D. turned science writer. Her Ph.D. work involved investigating eye movements as potential biomarkers for schizophrenia.

• Find a Therapist
• Find a Treatment Center
• Find a Psychiatrist
• Find a Support Group
• Find Online Therapy
• United States
• Brooklyn, NY
• Chicago, IL
• Houston, TX
• Los Angeles, CA
• New York, NY
• Portland, OR
• San Diego, CA
• San Francisco, CA
• Seattle, WA
• Washington, DC
• Asperger's
• Bipolar Disorder
• Chronic Pain
• Eating Disorders
• Passive Aggression
• Personality
• Goal Setting
• Positive Psychology
• Stopping Smoking
• Low Sexual Desire
• Relationships
• Child Development
• Self Tests NEW
• Therapy Center
• Diagnosis Dictionary
• Types of Therapy

Sticking up for yourself is no easy task. But there are concrete skills you can use to hone your assertiveness and advocate for yourself.

• Emotional Intelligence
• Gaslighting
• Affective Forecasting
• Neuroscience

Celebrating 150 years of Harvard Summer School. Learn about our history.

Need a Break from Social Media? Here’s Why You Should — and How to Do It

Social media can have many benefits, but sometimes you just need a break. This blog offers some tips on how to step away.

Jessica A. Kent

Today, social media is how we interact with the world. We do nearly everything online — messaging friends and family, learning new ideas, dating, shopping, reading news and events, and finding community.

As of 2022, users spend an average of two hours and 27 minutes per day on social media platforms like Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, and Facebook.

But sometimes it can just be too much. Staying so highly connected and being exposed to so much content can take its toll on your mental health, your relationships, and your productivity.

If you’re sensing that you’re using social media too distracting, or are coming away from social media feeling drained, sad, or less positive about the world, it may be time to reevaluate your relationship with social media and take a break. 

Here are some tools and tips for how to disengage — and how to return feeling refreshed.

The Benefits of Social Media

Social media, like many other features of modern life, is a tool. It has made connection around the world possible and offers a number of benefits.

Connection : Social media was designed for people to connect with others. Today, the primary reason people use social media is still to keep up with friends and family .

Community : Social media offers a way for people to connect with affinity groups or communities; this can be especially important to those who don’t have in-person access to those communities in their day-to-day lives. 

Networking and professional development : Users can network with coworkers, find job positions, or engage in professional development on platforms like LinkedIN.

News : Social media is a primary way people learn news, from updates from their friends to global news stories. One out of every five individuals say they get their political news from social media.

Brand Discovery : 83% of users say they use social media to discover new products or services . Many social media platforms also provide ways for customers to shop directly on the app as well.

Education : From life hacks to fun facts to tutorials, social media can serve as a place to learn something, too.

Entertainment : If you’ve spent any amount of time, for example, watching comedians on TikTok or artists on YouTube, you know that social media can just be for fun!

The Downside — and Darkside — to Social Media

While any technology has its upsides, it can also contribute to more negative effects. These impacts are what may be causing you to question your ongoing social media usage.

Impact on mental health : There have been a number of studies to confirm the correlation between social media use and the impacts to mental health, including increased depression , negative feelings resulting from comparison , higher anxiety, insomnia, and impulsive behavior , and an increase in anxiety disorders . Reasons for these impacts stem from feelings of inadequacy and inferiority in seeing other users’ carefully curated lives online. They also come from cyberbullying — 57% of school-age children say they’ve received abusive comments online.

FOMO : Social media usage can also heighten feelings of FOMO, or the fear of missing out, when someone sees friends and influencers only posting travel, successes, relationships, and other happy (yet curated) content. 62% of Facebook and Twitter users said that when compared to others’ posts, they felt their achievements were inadequate. Additionally, 30% say social media makes them feel lonely .

Overwhelm : It can be overwhelming to be exposed to so much content all at once and try to process what you’re seeing. Today, social media exposes us to everything happening everywhere all the time — both the good and the incredibly bad and violent. These feelings of overwhelm or fatigue can even be compared to PTSD .

Addition: Social media triggers the production of dopamine , a feel-good chemical that’s released whenever your brain makes a connection, learns something new, or when something grabs its attention. But social media is also designed to be addictive with elements like infinite scrolling, auto-play videos, notifications, sounds, bright colors, and other appealing features. A former Facebook employee compared social media to a slot machine that gives you the promise of a reward every time you interact with it.

Explore summer courses for high school students

Recognizing When You Need a Break

Considering all of the above, you may be ready for a break. Ask yourself the following questions if you think it’s time to reevaluate your relationship with social media:

• Do you come away from your interactions on social media feeling inspired, informed, and positive? Or are you drained, saddened, frustrated, overwhelmed, depressed, anxious, angry, or negative?
• Do you find yourself on a social media app, yet don’t remember picking up your phone and tapping on the app?
• Is the amount of time you’re spending on social media taking away from time you used to spend with friends or family, doing schoolwork, or doing other productive activities?
• Are you constantly comparing your life to the lives you see on social media, and think that you could never “catch up”?
• Have any friends or family members expressed concern that you’re on social media too much, or that you talk about what you see there too much?
• Do you have more activities and relationships in real life, or do you conduct most of your life on social media?
• Do you just have a feeling you need to take a break, but aren’t sure how?

If you answered yes to even a few of these questions, it may be time to step away from social media.

How to Disengage and Detox

If you’ve decided that you need a different relationship with social media, it doesn’t mean you have to get rid of your phone and quit social media forever. Here are a few methods of adjusting your habits — and hopefully set yourself up for success going forward.

Make a Plan

The first step is to make a plan for what you want to accomplish and how you want to accomplish it. If you simply want to reduce your screen time each day, what times will be off limits and what times will be designated as social media time? How will you go about enforcing that time limit? How many days or weeks will you reduce your social media consumption?

If you’re planning on completely cutting social media out of your life, choose a time period in which to do so that feels achievable. Detoxing from social media for a full month when it’s such an integral part of your life may seem daunting and set you up for failure. Try starting with one day per week, or practicing a “social media fast” on the weekends and go from there.

Recognize Your Triggers

Next, recognize your triggers for when you engage on social media. Do you find yourself mindlessly scrolling in certain situations? Do you turn to social media as a distraction from school or work? Do you check social media as soon as you wake up in the morning, or before you go to bed? Do you grab your phone any time you’re bored?

Once you recognize your triggers, you can take action to change those habits or fill your time in different ways. Find alternatives to spending time on social media, such as reading, taking a walk, working on a puzzle, or connecting with people in real life. Finding ways to fill your time before you disengage from social media will help make the transition easier.

Limit or Delete Apps

If you simply want to cut back on your usage each day, there are apps and settings you can use to limit your access, like the Freedom app or Cold Turkey. Both iPhone and Android allow users to set time limits on their apps in their settings, after which they’ll be blocked from using them.

You can also delete social media apps from your phone entirely, without deleting your accounts. If you find that you’re constantly picking up your phone and mindlessly tapping, take your apps off your phone for a period of time — you can always add them back in.

You can also change your tech altogether, as there’s a growing trend of Gen Z users are trading their smartphones for “dumb” phones in order to limit their time on social media.

Be Accountable

As you embark upon your disengagement or detox, find a friend, family member, or partner to help you out. Be accountable to them about your efforts, and enlist them to help you by checking in with you, holding your phone during non-social media times, or even entrusting them to change your passwords if you really want to log out.

Reevaluate and Return

Finally, choose a time length after which you’ll reevaluate your relationship with social media. You may decide that you really enjoy being off social media, and will continue to stay off of it. Or, you may decide that you want to engage in social media again, with added stipulations or other restrictions that can help you set boundaries for yourself and your mental health. If you return to social media, yet find yourself again becoming anxious, sad, angry, or negative, go back to the detox.

The Benefits of Disengagement

If you’re able to distance yourself for a significant period of time, there are many benefits to disengaging or detoxing from social media.

Free time : Without spending time on social media, you’ll find that you have more free time to devote elsewhere, like to relationships, activities, or new skills. If you use social media as a distraction while working, you’ll also likely find yourself more productive.

Improved mental health : Disengaging from comparison culture and constant bad news can help improve your mental health, reduce your anxiety, and help you feel more at peace. Staying off of social media can even improve your happiness

More connection : Detoxing from social media will give you the opportunity to connect with others in real life. Maybe it’s catching up with friends over coffee, joining a club, volunteering with an organization, taking up a sport, or other in-person activity.

Better sleep : Detoxing from social media can also help you sleep better if you were one of the 70% of social media users who scroll before bed. Not only will the lack of stimulation help you sleep, but the lack of blue light will help you sleep as well.

Decreased FOMO : Once off social media, your likelihood of comparing yourself to others will decrease, as individuals who took a break from social media experience decreased FOMO, and an increase in mental wellbeing and social connection . No longer chasing after what others have can help you better define your own personal goals, values, and desires.

Ultimately, you’re the one who can decide if taking a break from social media is right for you. Taking some of these steps can help refresh both your relationship to and perspective on social media and keep you more connected to what really matters.

Learn more about our summer programs for high school students

About the Author

Jessica A. Kent is a freelance writer based in Boston, Mass. and a Harvard Extension School alum. Her digital marketing content has been featured on Fast Company, Forbes, Nasdaq, and other industry websites; her essays and short stories have been featured in North American Review, Emerson Review, Writer’s Bone, and others.

Is It Time to Leave Your Comfort Zone? How Leaving Can Spark Positive Change

Getting outside your comfort zone can feel like a daunting task. But there are simple steps to pushing yourself to achieve what you want.

Harvard Division of Continuing Education

The Division of Continuing Education (DCE) at Harvard University is dedicated to bringing rigorous academics and innovative teaching capabilities to those seeking to improve their lives through education. We make Harvard education accessible to lifelong learners from high school to retirement.

I Quit Social Media for 5 Weeks and Here's What Happened

I’ve been using social media since I was 15. (MySpace, anyone?) Before I started college, you still needed a valid college e-mail address to sign up for Facebook. I hopped on board in the spring of 2006 during my senior year of high school—as soon as I got that .edu golden ticket. 

A note to younger millennials and Gen Z ers: Back then, we had to walk uphill in the snow—both ways—to sign in to Facebook on our dorm room laptops.

It wasn’t long before Facebook opened its doors to everyone , and my college friends panicked about how they’d hide their debauchery from Aunt Mary and Grandpa Joe. We couldn’t even begin to comprehend that we might one day be panicking about the use of the platform to disrupt American democracy .

I’ve always been an early and eager adopter of new social media platforms. I joined Twitter in 2009 and Instagram in 2011. I even dabbled in Vine for a brief period ( R.I.P. ). It took me a while to get Snapchat, but by 2014 I couldn’t deny the allure of sending obnoxious photos to my friends that would disappear in 10 seconds or less.

But research shows that the more people use Facebook in a day, the less moment-to-moment happiness and life satisfaction they experience. And nearly half of millennials worry about the negative effects of social media on their physical and mental health, according to Stress in America 2017: Technology and Social Media , an American Psychological Association study. In my own, not-so-scientific experiments, I’ve learned that reading certain tweets (you know the ones) increases my heart rate and induces rage 100 percent of the time.

Most of the research around the effects of social media have centered on children and young adults, says Dimitri Christakis, M.D., M.P.H. , a professor of pediatrics at the University of Washington School of Medicine . As director of the Center for Child Health, Behavior and Development at Seattle Children’s, he studies the environmental influences on children’s development and behavior, including digital media and social media.

“Until recently we’ve neglected the fact that the addictive qualities aren’t unique to kids,” he says. “If we think of social media as coming to the fore with the advent of Facebook, which has only been around for 10 years, it started for people who had to be 14 to get on Facebook at the time. It’s a condition that started permeating adolescents and young adults, but now it’s everywhere.”

What happened during my social media break

For months I'd been wondering what life would be like without all the extra background noise and daily subtle comparisons. Would I have more focus? Would I be more present? Would I be happier?

To find out, I took a break from social media from Thanksgiving until New Year’s Day. Here’s what happened in five weeks without social media, and what I learned when I signed back in.

My inbox was squeaky clean.

I’ve taken measures to limit my social media use in the past. I’ve tried deleting apps or moving them deeper into my list of apps thinking I might not put in the effort to seek them out, or that I just wouldn’t remember where I put them. But somehow , the apps have eventually found their way back into my life every time.

The first day I deleted the apps after publicly announcing I wouldn’t be using social media, I realized just how habitual my use had become. I found my thumb instinctively swiping to find the Instagram app after I answered texts, an unconscious loop that my brain had developed. With nothing else to do on my phone and a not-yet-kicked desire to swipe, I deleted hundreds of junk emails that had been piling up.

This makes sense, Christakis says.

Your brain says, ‘I like that, do more of that, get more of that,’ which reinforces the behavior of checking your phone all the time, he explains.

“The important thing to know is that the addictive properties of these sites aren’t incidental or coincidental. They’re quite deliberate and intentional,” says Christakis. “We live in what some people call an ‘attention economy.’ All of these sites make their money by competing for your attention and they build in features that make it difficult for you to disengage.”

I started reaching out to friends more directly.

Before my social media break, Snapchat was my guilty pleasure. I told myself that it was just like texting. But what I didn’t consider was that, even though I was sending and receiving messages with friends, doing it through social media made it inherently less personal. 

During my break, instead of snapping a photo of a weird poster or beautiful flower and shooting it off to 10 friends, I had to actually think about who I’d share things with. The result was more personal texts that made me feel more connected, and I hope made friends feel more connected, too.

As Christakis tells me, it’s not that social media is all bad. When used to connect in meaningful ways with people you actually know or to get information that’s true and relevant to your life, social media can be a helpful form of modern communication. 

“The challenge is, how do you develop a conscious strategy to utilize the good parts and minimize the bad parts?” he says. 

I had more time for other things.

Smartphones and social media have an uncanny way of filling up empty time. Waiting in the checkout line at the grocery store? Let me just peek at texts or Instagram really fast. Sitting on public transit? Don’t mind if I do.

I’m lucky to have a short commute to work: only about 20 minutes by bus. What slipped into social media time more often than I care to admit was now totally free for other things. I dove into podcasts I had been meaning to listen to. I read a real book made out of paper. I just sat there. When I walked my dog, it was just she and I and whatever we noticed along the way.

David Levy, Ph.D. , is a professor in the Information School at the University of Washington and the author of Mindful Tech: How to Bring Balance to Our Digital Lives . His model sounds simple, but can be complex: pay attention to how you feel and what you’re experiencing in your mind and body when you’re using technology, like social media. Do you use it when you’re bored, or when you’re craving connection? Does it make you feel anxious?

“Before, your habits were partly formed unconsciously. But when you start noticing, for example, what you were doing on the bus, you open up space and time for other possibilities,” he says.

I wasn’t missing much.

Much to my delight, taking a social media break was easier than I expected. Aside from the fact that I had to quickly X out any time I clicked on an Instagram link from a design article and that I realized just how many outside websites rely on a Facebook login, disengaging got easier after the first few days of obsessive inbox clearing. It helped that the people who truly wanted to contact me knew about the break and were willing to take the steps to get in touch off of social media.

On January 1, I took a deep breath and started to catch up, expecting to see a whole bunch of interesting stuff I had been missing out on. But I got bored before I even finished and realized that I already knew what I needed to know about the people who I care about. I’d rather text, call or email friends than “connect” with them on Snapchat, anyway.

With other addictions, like smoking, drinking or gambling, the solution is always total abstinence. But that gets a little murky when it comes to social media use, says Christakis.

“It’s woven into the fabric of society,” he says. “It’s like you’re a recovering alcoholic but you work in a bar.”

Taking a break helped me learn that some social media use, with boundaries, may be sustainable. It also helped me realize I don’t enjoy some of it as much as I thought. To be determined if my life is better or worse without the ability to use the dancing hotdog filter and/or receive my friend Billy’s amazing selfie snaps.

How I’ll use the lessons I learned

Just like a fad diet, it’s easy to fall back into old habits after a period of totally eliminating something from your life. It quickly became clear to me that I would need to set some ground rules for myself if I wanted the positive lessons to stick.

“The model I’ve been trying to promote is to pay attention and notice what your actual experience is and then, by observing your experience, begin to formulate a set of guidelines for what you would change,” says Levy.

That meant unfollowing people and brands on Instagram to minimize the noise and unfriending people on Facebook who I’d barely recognize if they were walking down the street. It meant choosing to have only one social media app on my phone. And it meant making a commitment to use social media as a catalyst for connecting with people in real life and to continue questioning why I use certain technologies—and how, or if, they positively contribute to my life.

Recommended for you

Everyone needs strong, supportive friendships, but it can be challenging to find community.

• Load more stories

What are the long-term effects of quitting social media? Almost nobody can log off long enough to find out

Associate Professor, School of Behavioural, Cognitive and Social Sciences, University of New England

Disclosure statement

John Malouff does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

University of New England provides funding as a member of The Conversation AU.

View all partners

Being on social media has become synonymous with living in the 21st century. Year after year, we see new platforms and smarter algorithms roping us into highly addictive online worlds.

Now, a growing number of people have noticed this trend and are actively making an effort to resist it.

Anecdotally, a case can be made for quitting social media, and there are myriad reasons why someone might want to. But is there evidence that doing so is good for you in the long term?

Drivers for quitting

Although there are too many social media platforms to name, most people tend to think of the “big five”: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and TikTok.

Research has found people have various reasons for quitting one or more of these apps. Many quit over concerns about negative impacts on their mental and physical health. For example, studies have shown adolescent girls in particular can experience negative body image as a result of viewing manipulated selfies on Instagram .

People also choose to quit due to disliking ads, feeling like they’re wasting time, or if they’re worried about their privacy. The question then is: does quitting social media resolve these concerns?

Read more: New evidence shows half of Australians have ditched social media at some point, but millennials lag behind

Mixed research outcomes

It’s difficult to determine whether there are clear and lasting benefits to quitting social media – and a look at the research explains why.

One 2020 study found people who had quit social media saw improvements in their close relationships, and were pleased to be free of comparison with others. But some also said they missed the informational and entertainment aspects of it.

In a 2018 study , researchers assessed the psychological state of 143 American undergraduates before randomly assigning one group a daily ten-minute limit for Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat, per platform. Three weeks later, those who limited their social media use showed significantly lower levels of loneliness and depression. However, there was no significant effect on anxiety, self-esteem or wellbeing.

And in one 2019 study with 78 participants, half were asked to take a one-week break from Facebook and Instagram. To the researchers’ surprise, the users in this group who were generally active on social media experienced less positive psychological effects than those in the control group.

With research findings painting several different pictures, it’s safe to say our relationship with social media – and how it affects us – is very complex.

Research constraints

There appear to be no published studies that have assessed the long-term impacts of permanently quitting social media. This is probably because it’s difficult to find participants who will agree to be randomly assigned the task of dropping social media forever.

One important consideration is that a percentage of individuals who quit social media will eventually go back . Reasons for returning include feeling left out, fearing loss of connections, wanting to regain access to interesting or useful information, feeling social pressure to rejoin, or simply feeling that quitting wasn’t the right choice.

Even if researchers do find a large enough group of people willing to quit social media for good, conducting long-term follow-ups would be highly resource-intensive. Beyond that, it would be difficult to figure out how much of a participant’s increase (or decrease) in life satisfaction is due to quitting social media, and not other factors.

As such, there’s currently no evidence that quitting social media comes with concrete long-term benefits. And in the short term, results are mixed.

To quit, or not to quit?

However, that doesn’t mean quitting (for a short or long period) wouldn’t be beneficial for some people. It’s likely that any potential benefits will depend on the individual doing the quitting, and why they’re doing it.

For instance, consensus that does emerge from the research is that the way you use social media plays a significant role in how negative or positive your experience is. By using social media mindfully , users can minimise potential harms while retaining the benefits.

For some, it may only be one platform causing unease. If you strongly dislike Instagram’s tendency to be hyper-focused on people’s private lives, then you could simply stop using Instagram.

Another technique is to curate your social media feeds by engaging only with content you find useful and positive. For instance, many young women take steps to avoid seeing perfect bodies all day on their social media.

If you’re still wondering whether quitting might be good for you, the simplest way to find out is to experiment and do it.

Take a break from one or more types of social media. After some time ask yourself whether the benefits seem worth it to you. If the answer is “yes”, make the break permanent.

Read more: Want to delete your social media, but can't bring yourself to do it? Here are some ways to take that step

The Conversation is commissioning articles by academics across the world who are researching how society is being shaped by our digital interactions with each other. Read more here

• Social media
• Mental health
• Social media habits
• Social media and society
• Social media and teens

Casual Facilitator: GERRIC Student Programs - Arts, Design and Architecture

Senior Lecturer, Digital Advertising

Service Delivery Fleet Coordinator

Manager, Centre Policy and Translation

Newsletter and Deputy Social Media Producer

Productivity

How to quit social media for a happier and more focused life.

I’ve noticed that when I catch up with a friend, family member, or colleague, the other person will at some point ask if I saw what someone posted on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter. My permanent reply: “No, I didn’t see it.” I’m sure some of you think I’m bragging about my lack of social media activity. There are certainly people who wear quitting social media as a rebellious badge of honor.

The fact, however, is that I’ve recently realized that by limiting social media, I’m leading a much happier and more focused life. Despite the curious looks I get when I tell loved ones I didn’t see that latest video to go viral on Facebook, I never once experienced a sensation of missing out, and here’s why.

Table of Contents

The upside to life without social media, how to realistically limit social media, final thoughts.

I was recently reading an article about the cost of debt on happiness [1] , and it reminded me of how certain things have a taxing effect on happiness. Similar to debt, there’s certain things that can be so distracting that it can influence your personal life and how you work in a negative way.

Less Distraction

At work, I’d stop what I was doing any time I received a social media notification. While one way around this would be to turn off notifications, use an app that blocks sites, or completely turn off my phone, I’d still feel anxious about having to check my social feeds.

FOMO is a very real thing. In fact, research conducted at Duke University’s Center for Advanced Hindsight found that even if you turn off notifications, you still feel anxious that you’re missing out. [2]

These distractions may seem harmless, but they play a part in your productivity as well. Joanne Cantor, PhD, professor emerita of communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of the book Conquer CyberOverload , said: [3]

“When we stop ourselves to check social media again and again, it really becomes another form of multitasking, and multitasking makes whatever you do take longer, and you do it in an inferior way.”

Greater Productivity

The American Psychological Association reports that multitasking , such as going back and forth between social media and a work-related task, can actually reduce your productivity by as much as 40 percent.

After quitting social media, you’ll find that you’re able to focus on a given task until it’s done, which will inevitably make you more productive and efficient with your work.

Enjoying the Present

Outside of work, social media distracts you from enjoying the present. For example, let’s say you’re having dinner with your family. Instead of spending quality time with your loved ones, everyone’s faces are glued to their smartphones like mindless zombies. That’s definitely not going to strengthen the relationships you have with one another.

Here’s another example. You go to a concert or a baseball game with a friend or business acquaintance. You’re not deeply involved in this activity or, worse, enjoying the company you’re with because you’re too busy posting social media updates — or checking in to see what everyone else is posting.

Besides these distractions, I’ve also noticed that I actually have more free time. I’ve been able to use this time to read, write, or learn new skills that make me a stronger person, both personally and professionally.

Without social media, I’ve been more productive and able to truly enjoy the company of the people I care about. Also, I have felt less stressed and am sleeping better.

Sleeping Better

Research has found that social media is linked to poor sleep, anxiety, depression, and low self-esteem. [4]

This shouldn’t be surprising. We lay in bed scrolling through our feeds, comparing ourselves to others. On top of that blue light from our screens stimulating our brains, we get jealous and wish we were lying on a beach instead of preparing for work in the morning.

I’ll be the first to admit that quitting social media isn’t easy. The fear of missing out, of course, plays a role. Even if you aren’t addicted to social media , you’re likely to experience withdrawal symptoms when you limit. That’s actually the first step in being able to successfully limit social media: realizing you’re going to miss out on certain things .

Eventually, you’ll realize you aren’t as isolated as you believe. In fact, you may have even stronger relationships because your main communication methods are more intimate, like texts and phone calls.

Here are some steps you can take when building up to quitting social media.

1. Eliminate Push Notifications

This is a good first step to take when quitting social media. Constantly hearing the distracting beeps of notifications can create anxiety and cause you jump back on social media. Eliminating those notifications will get you used to staying away from your social media for longer periods of time. You may even find you don’t check it for an entire day!

2. Uninstall Social Media Apps

You should uninstall all social media apps from your phone and log out of them on your computer . This is just a simple way to remove the temptation to view your social channels with one click or tap. Though it will be a rough start, you’ll eventually experience the benefits of not being tied to social media.

3. Find New Distractions

When quitting social media, start looking for other ways to distract yourself so that you can avoid dwelling on the anxiety of being away from your feed. Pick up a new hobby, meditate, exercise, volunteer, read a book, or actually meet to catch up with a friend face-to-face.

Not only do these activities give you something else to focus on, but they also allow you to strengthen your existing relationships and establish new, more meaningful ones.

If you feel you need social media to stay in the loop, seek out alternatives like newsletters or RSS feeds that are relevant. If you have to establish a social media presence professionally, set boundaries, such as logging in once a week to check messages and schedule the following week’s content. You can also delegate or outsource your social media responsibilities so you can remain free of social media.

You can live without social media, and it’s probably for the best. However, it is an adjustment. You’ll miss out on certain things, but you’re also going to be happier and more focused because you’ll be less distracted and stressed. You’ll also be more productive and fulfilled.

To ease your way into this, don’t go cold turkey. Limit your time on social media, and then suspend your accounts for a week, then maybe two, then possibly permanently. As you’ll see, it’s not the end of the world and will do wonders for your mental health.

Featured photo credit: Becca Tapert via unsplash.com

How to Use a Planner Effectively

How to Be a Better Planner: Avoid the Planning Fallacy

5 Best Apps to Help You Delegate Tasks Easily

Delegating Leadership Style: What Is It & When To Use It?

The Fear of Delegating Work To Others

Why Is Delegation Important in Leadership?

7 Best Tools for Prioritizing Work

How to Deal with Competing Priorities Effectively

What Is the RICE Prioritization Model And How Does It Work?

4 Exercises to Improve Your Focus

What Is Chronic Procrastination and How To Deal with It

How to Snap Out of Procrastination With ADHD

Are Depression And Procrastination Connected?

Procrastination And Laziness: Their Differences & Connections

Bedtime Procrastination: Why You Do It And How To Break It

15 Books on Procrastination To Help You Start Taking Action

Productive Procrastination: Is It Good or Bad?

The Impact of Procrastination on Productivity

How to Cope With Anxiety-Induced Procrastination

How to Break the Perfectionism-Procrastination Loop

15 Work-Life Balance Books to Help You Take Control of Life

Work Life Balance for Women: What It Means & How to Find It

6 Essential Mindsets For Continuous Career Growth

How to Discover Your Next Career Move Amid the Great Resignation

The Key to Creating a Vibrant (And Magical Life) by Lee Cockerell

9 Tips on How To Disconnect From Work And Stay Present

Work-Life Integration vs Work-Life Balance: Is One Better Than the Other?

How To Practice Self-Advocacy in the Workplace (Go-to Guide)

How to Boost Your Focus And Attention Span

What Are Distractions in a Nutshell?

What Is Procrastination And How To End It

Prioritization — Using Your Time & Energy Effectively

Delegation — Leveraging Your Time & Resources

Your Guide to Effective Planning & Scheduling

The Ultimate Guide to Achieving Goals

How to Find Lasting Motivation

Complete Guide to Getting Back Your Energy

How to Have a Good Life Balance

Explore the time flow system.

About the Time Flow System

Key Philosophy I: Fluid Progress, Like Water

Key Philosophy II: Pragmatic Priorities

Key Philosophy III: Sustainable Momentum

Key Philosophy IV: Three Goal Focus

How the Time Flow System Works

• Newsletters
• Best Industries
• Business Plans
• Home-Based Business
• The UPS Store
• Customer Service
• Black in Business
• Your Next Move
• Female Founders
• Best Workplaces
• Company Culture
• Public Speaking
• HR/Benefits
• Productivity
• All the Hats
• Digital Transformation
• Artificial Intelligence
• Bringing Innovation to Market
• Cloud Computing
• Social Media
• Data Detectives
• Exit Interview
• Bootstrapping
• Crowdfunding
• Venture Capital
• Business Models
• Personal Finance
• Founder-Friendly Investors
• Upcoming Events
• Inc. 5000 Vision Conference
• Become a Sponsor
• Cox Business
• Verizon Business
• Branded Content
• Apply Inc. 5000 US

Inc. Premium

Why a Successful Millennial Says You Should Quit Social Media (and What You Should Do Instead)

Georgetown professor and author cal newport explains why social media is killing your career..

Cal Newport is a busy man: He's an associate professor of computer science at Georgetown University, the author of several successful books and also runs a widely-read blog .

But you won't find Newport tweeting about his work or sharing it on Facebook .

Because he believes it's a waste of time. More specifically, he argues social media reduces anyone's ability to produce something of value.

Newport explains in an essay he recently penned for The New York Times:

"The ability to concentrate without distraction on hard tasks is becoming increasingly valuable in an increasingly complicated economy. Social media weakens this skill because it's engineered to be addictive. The more you use social media in the way it's designed to be used--persistently throughout your waking hours--the more your brain learns to crave a quick hit of stimulus at the slightest hint of boredom. Once this Pavlovian connection is solidified, it becomes hard to give difficult tasks the unbroken concentration they require, and your brain simply won't tolerate such a long period without a fix. Indeed, part of my own rejection of social media comes from this fear that these services will diminish my ability to concentrate -- the skill on which I make my living. The idea of purposefully introducing into my life a service designed to fragment my attention is as scary to me as the idea of smoking would be to an endurance athlete, and it should be to you if you're serious about creating things that matter."

Newport acknowledges that this claim runs counter to our current understanding of social media's role in the professional world. Many say maintaining your brand on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram is vital to gaining access to opportunities you might otherwise miss and helps you build the diverse contact network you need to get ahead.

But Newport argues this behavior is misguided. "Social media use is decidedly not rare or valuable," he writes. "Any 16-year-old with a smartphone can invent a hashtag or repost a viral article. The idea that if you engage in enough of this low-value activity, it will somehow add up to something of high value in your career is the same dubious alchemy that forms the core of most snake oil and flimflam in business."

What should you do instead?

Newport quotes Steve Martin, who often advised aspiring entertainers: "Be so good they can't ignore you."

"The foundation to achievement and fulfillment, almost without exception, requires that you hone a useful craft and then apply it to things that people care about, writes Newport. "If you do that, the rest will work itself out, regardless of the size of your Instagram following."

My Experience

There's a lot of truth to Newport's opinion.

As one who's active on Twitter and LinkedIn, I've found certain benefits--but those benefits are often outweighed by the negative. I've also seen firsthand the power of social media--but not from my own accounts. The more I'm focused on producing something of value--which I attempt through my writing --the more others share my work...and the more opportunities come to me.

Some argue that you need to take control of your brand, lest others do it for you. But that's not true: The best brands are those we find to be authentic and transparent, not some type of fabricated image. If you focus on creating value, your message will spread.

And people will always come back to the source.

As a caveat to this advice, I've cultivated a number of mutually beneficial relationships that began on social media. For that reason, I don't plan on quitting outright.

However, Newport's essay has inspired me to reevaluate how I use social media--and to make sure I'm maximizing the use of my time.

Because when it comes to doing great work, every second counts.

A refreshed look at leadership from the desk of CEO and chief content officer Stephanie Mehta

Privacy Policy

How to break social media addiction, or spend less time online

• You may be able to break a social media addiction by going on a cleanse, setting limits, and deleting apps.
• While you don't need to abstain from social media entirely, experts say it's important to set limits.
• This article  was medically reviewed  by  Zlatin Ivanov, MD , who is certified in psychiatry and addiction psychiatry by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology at  Psychiatrist NYC .
• Visit Insider's homepage for more stories .

The American Society of Addiction Medicine defines addiction as a behavior that becomes compulsive or continues despite negative consequences. In 2017, 43% of Americans reported checking social media constantly, and 20% said social media is a source of stress. 

In addition, interacting with social media can trigger a dopamine response in the brain, similar to that triggered by drug or alcohol use. That response can leave you wanting more and feeling addicted. Here's how to fight it. 

How to break social media addiction

In 2018, people with internet access worldwide spent an average of 144 minutes on social media every day. Yet research indicates that limiting social media use to 30 minutes a day is optimal for mental health.  

Abstinence is often recommended for treating drug or alcohol addiction, but for social media addiction, the ideal psychological outcome is controlled use of the internet. It's not necessary to give up social media entirely, but it is important to have strategies for setting limits. 

Lin Sternlicht , a licensed mental health counselor at Family Addiction Specialist, recommends that people who are concerned about social media addiction take the following steps:

• Go on a social media cleanse: Challenge yourself to go a certain time without checking social media, whether it's for a few hours or an entire week. One 2019 study found that some students who went for five days without social media experienced a "sense of serenity," although others were afraid of missing out. 
• Delete apps, or disable notifications from social media: Most people check into social media mindlessly, so put a small barrier in the way by turning off notifications . If you don't see a social media icon or alert every time you pick up your phone, you're less likely to spend time there. 
• Set limits and stick to them. Most phones and tablets allow you to see the time you've spent on certain apps. Set a limit for your time spent on social media and stick to it, or use an app that blocks social media after you've hit your limit. For teens , the American Academy of Pediatrics also recommends that social media use not interfere with activities like family meals, exercise, or "unplugged downtime."
• Dedicate time to hobbies or activites. A hobby or new activity can help curb your desire to check in to social media. "The idea here is to fill up your free time with things that you enjoy that are good for you," Sternlicht says. "Naturally you will find less time to be on social media and more time to be present in life, and hopefully even socialize in person instead of through a screen."

Accountability is more important than abstinence 

Going on a digital detox — or totally abstaining from social media for a certain period of time — can be effective for some people, but not others, says Neha Chaudhary , MD, child and adolescent psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. 

"For some, it may break a cycle that has started to feel toxic or have negative effects," she says. "For others, stopping altogether may lead to craving its use and not being able to sustain the break, or might keep someone from accessing the beneficial parts of social media, like a way to stay connected and reach out for support."

Rather than relying on a total detox, Chaudhary recommends setting limits and recruiting some of your friends and family to join you. 

"Accountability plays a big role in trying to make any change," she says. "Maybe decide with a friend that you want to both reduce use, or tell your family member your goals so that they can check in with you about it. Whatever it is, find a way to have someone help keep you on track — breaking habits alone can be difficult."

In severe cases, someone who is worried about social media addiction should also consider seeking professional help from a therapist or mental health specialist.

Watch: I quit social media for 1 month — it was the best choice I ever made

• Main content

mindful . technology

Jaron Lanier’s Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

A review and summary of Jaron Lanier’s book on how social media platforms are destroying our individuality and corrupting our society. Four years after the book was written, are these concerns still relevant?

Review & summary of Jaron Lanier’s 2018 book on why we should be quitting social media in its current form

Last year, when watching The Social Dilemma , one of the interviewees stood out to me amongst the other, more typical big tech insiders. Jaron Lanier, with his long blonde dreadlocks and his dynamic way of speaking, appeared at first glance to be an ageing hippie who might recall his acid trips or his travels to an Ashram in India in his youth.

Whether he took such journeys I do not know, but the content of his speech suggested that the “ageing hippie” stereotype was far from his full story. As it turns out, Jaron Lanier is a Silicon Valley insider sometimes known as “The founder of Virtual Reality” for his work on VR tech in the 1980s. He is currently Interdisciplinary Scientist at Microsoft Research, has written bestselling books relating to the philosophy of technology, and somehow manages to compose and play music to a professional standard alongside his tech career.

Jaron Lanier was included in the cast of The Social Dilemma , along with voices from the Center for Humane Technology , due to his speaking out about the dangers of social media (in its current form). He set out these concerns in his 2018 book, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now . I wanted to understand more about his views than I could gather from short segments of The Social Dilemma, so I decided to read his book.

In the introduction, Jaron Lanier takes inspiration from cats. Cats he says, are popular on the internet because they are independent, unpredictable and live life on their terms. Unlike dogs, cats are not easily trained, and therefore represent an ideal we should aspire to when we go online and are exposed to social media platforms which attempt to manipulate our behaviour in order to sustain themselves through selling ads.

Through Jaron Lanier’s ten arguments he explains the many ways in which social media can cause difficulty for us, both individually and collectively. It’s worth noting that the arguments are not against all forms of social media, but the currently popular platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and others which use targeted advertising to sustain themselves. In theory, there could be a social media platform which helps us communicate with friends and family for which these arguments do not apply.

What are Jaron Lanier’s 10 arguments for quitting social media?

Although the book presents ten individual arguments, each in its own chapter, these arguments build on each other, so are best read in sequence. I suspect Lanier was aware of the irony of giving his book a clickbait-y title and format of the sort that increases engagement on a social media platform.

The first two chapters really set up the rest of the book, providing context and terms that are used throughout the book. The define the concept of behavioral modification and discuss platforms which do this, which Lanier terms BUMMER platforms.

Argument 1: losing your free will

In the first argument, You are losing your free will , Lanier argues that the popular social media platforms are all based around a core process of behavior modification . The platforms need to get use hooked so that we use them regularly – this is one form of behavior modification – the platforms themselves can be addictive. Once we are hooked, then they show us advertisements which tend to be highly targeted based on various data collected about us through regular usage. These advertisements are also a form of behaviour modification which can have an impact on us as individuals and at a collective level, where corporations, our government or foreign governments can manipulate our political views just as easily as they influence our buying behaviour.

Argument 2: behavioral modification empires for rent

Argument two, quitting social media is the most finely targeted way to resist the insanity of our times , requires a bit more context to understand, but unfortunately in this chapter, the context is not provided here. Presumably for Lanier, writing in later 2017 it was so clear to him that we are living in insane times that it did not need to be explained. Writing in America where Donald Trump had recently become president, perhaps that was the insanity he had in mind. He does not mention Trump in this chapter, but later in the book makes it clear that he found Trump and in particular his social media habits disturbing. Whilst I tend to agree, something like 50% of the voting public would have disagreed with the assessment that Trump as President is a form of societal insanity (unless they were voting for insanity).

It would have been helpful for this chapter to set out a clear (and preferably non-partisan) context for the term “Insanity of our Times”. Was there something in particular was it that made 2017 more insane that the pre-social media early 2000s, which saw the 9/11 terrorist attacks and was followed by US wars in Afghanistan and later Iraq (despite that country having no significant links with terrorism)? Perhaps the insanity of 2017 was not more insane, just a different kind of insanity.

Even without a clear context however, the chapter is significant, because it introduces a term which Lanier uses throughout the book: BUMMER. This stands for “Behaviors of Users Modified, and Made into an Empire for Rent” – but clearly it is the implication of the word “bummer” that matters more than the terms that make up the acronym.

Lanier describes Facebook, Twitter, and Google as BUMMER platforms because they are all sustained through a targeted advertising model which requires us to spend significant time on the platforms, to the extent that advertisers with enough money can significantly modify behaviour of the platform’s users in a measurable way. He proceeds to list a number of disturbing qualities that BUMMER platforms tend to have, but offers hope in that not all big tech firms are not fully dependent on the BUMMER model. He points out that three of the big five tech firms: Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft (whom Lanier works for) are less dependent on targeted advertising than Google and Facebook.

Argument 3: unhealthy interactions

At this stage in the book, Lanier has described how BUMMER social media platforms work and proceeds to describe some of the unfortunate consequences of the BUMMER model in more depth.

Argument 3 is that social media is making you into an asshole . Lanier makes the argument that brief online interactions in public tend to cause conflict (or alternatively, people are artificially nice and avoid discussing anything substantial to avoid such conflict). Whereas in a real life conversation, a long-form article, documentary, or book, there is space for nuance, this is not the case for the short messages people have time to post on social media.

Lanier sees the problem not only as a lack of nuance, but that when we are online we are involved in “pack” behaviour, rather than “solitary wolf” behaviour which he sees as more liberating. In a pack, we want to protect and improve upon our social status, and when it seems necessary to put others down to do this, we often do. There may be some evolutionary advantage for this kind of pack behaviour, but for most of us this is probably a less productive use of time on the global stage of Twitter than it is for our local pack, for example at work. Lanier believes our more creative and worthwhile pursuits occur when we embrace our individuality, and therefore we take the opportunity to eliminate the pack-like interactions of social media from our lives.

It occurs to me as I write, that I am also engaged in a form of pack-like online behaviour. Although the process of writing is solitary and mostly offline, I know that I will publish this online and share it on social media, and that I would be happy if it receives “likes” and increases my status as a blogger. I know that if someone were to criticise my blog post on social media or in the comments, my initial reaction would be to want to defend my work and my ego, and when doing this I might sound like an asshole. But I think that it’s far more effective & fulfilling than sharing views directly on social media, since here there is space for nuance, and the majority of my time is spent in this solitary & creative mode of writing rather than engaged in interactions with “the pack”.

Argument 4: undermining truth

Argument 4 is that social media is undermining truth . Here Lanier points out that the online ecosystem consists of a large proportion of fake people: many of the likes, followers, comments & reviews that are used to imply popularity to both human users and the algorithms that surface popular content are fake. Some of this fake content may be created by bots, some by low-paid workers (for example, to get around captcha technology), or directly by business owners who wish to promote their own wares. This is not rare at all: inspect any popular Twitter account and you’ll discover a significant number of followers are suspected bots. Lanier also mentions fake news here: on social media, clickbait articles which are less truthful and often wrong tend to rise to be most popular.

Argument 5: on social media, what you say loses its context

Argument 5 is that social media is making what you say meaningless . The idea is that what is shared on social media has far less context than the real world, or other forms of media. If I listen to a talk, read a book, or watch a documentary, there is sufficient time to establish context, so that the views expressed are understood. On social media that is typically not the case: only tiny snippets are shared. A link to a news article with a clickbait title, an opinion, a meme. All of this is mixed together and interspersed with ads.

Algorithms are not just showing these randomly, they’re targeting you to maximise usage: this can often lead to showing you things without context to create controversy, which increases engagement. Disagreements and animosity may be created between you and your friends, when in a real conversation, with full context, you would have come to understand each other and find common agreement.

Argument 6: losing your capacity for empathy

This argument about the lack of context on social media is extended a little further in argument 6: social media is destroying your capacity for empathy . When the things we share on social media don’t have context, we only see small fragments about our friend’s views, usually selected or by algorithms or where our friend was influenced by an algorithm to share something. As in real life, everyone has a different perspective, but on social media this can be more extreme as everything is personalised to us by algorithms. Without having experienced the same inputs as others, it becomes harder to understand their perspective, and we end up in echo chambers where we see the people in other echo chambers as crazy.

Argument 7: social media tends to make people less happy

Argument 7 is that social media is making you unhappy . It’s a simple argument because there are many studies to back this up. Facebook even demonstrated that they could impact the emotional state of users to be happier or sadder by showing more positive or negative posts. Facebook now acknowledges that social media can make people less happy, but argues that it’s about how we use social media. This is almost certainly true, but perhaps for many people, healthy use of social media may be more challenging than quitting.

In this chapter, Lanier explains what makes him unhappy about social media: this mostly revolves around the feeling of being ranked. We are ranked on social media through a count of the number of friends, or the number of likes our posts receive. Lanier dislikes this feeling because he feels drawn into wanting to “win” at these games, even though he finds them ridiculous.

Argument 8: earning a living in a world of social media

Argument 8 is that social media doesn’t want you to have economic dignity . Since users do not pay for these platforms with money, and they rely on small advertising payments for user engagement, the only way to make a living via “BUMMER” social media platforms (eg as a YouTuber) is to be one of the top stars. Whereas with a paid service such as Netflix, vast numbers of professional people are supported by the platform to film new content.

Lanier explains how zero-cost platforms came to exist because of various ideals around the freedom of information and how the advertising model was found as the most obvious way to fund these platforms. He begins to describe alternative business models involving payment for services and explicit control of personal data sharing, but there is not enough space here to do so convincingly, and the few paragraphs given to this seem to raise more questions than they answer.

Argument 9: social media and politics

Argument 9 is that social media is making politics impossible. Lanier discusses how the early adopters of social media platforms tend to be young, educated and idealistic and this made political engagement via social media seem very positive in the early years. But in more recent years, as social media reached a far wider audience, becoming a multi-billion dollar industry, the political consequences of social media have been more chaotic.

An early sign of this was the 2011 Arab Spring, where revolutions in the middle east were linked to organising on social media. Unfortunately, the outcome of those revolutions turned out to be a disappointment: return to military rule in Egypt, ongoing war in Syria, and the destabilisation of Libya. The persecution of the Rohingya people Myanmar, which was ongoing as Lanier wrote the book, was also linked to the rise of social media in that country.

Since Lanier wrote the book in 2017, politics has not improved: the US in particular became more polarised and chaotic, culminating in the Capitol Riot of January 2021 . In the age of social media echo chambers, it’s hard to remain hopeful of building understanding and consensus between liberals and conservatives.

Argument 10: on social media as religion

The tenth and final argument is that social media “hates your soul”. In this chapter, Lanier compares BUMMER social media to a religion. By this point, much like the clickbait articles which must have inspired the name and structure of this book, it begins to feel tedious and the argument seems to be a filler to get to ten. Don’t skip this chapter however… the way Lanier highlights the creepiness of big tech firms by looking at how in their corporate mission statements they place themselves at the centre of all reality, is an enjoyable take on a disconcerting topic.

At just under 150 pages, this is a short and snappy book, which might just convince you to quit social media. As the book’s conclusion says, you do not have to stay quit forever: you can consider it an experiment to see what you learn, and return later if it doesn’t work out. Lanier accepts that people are not going to quit all at once but feels that some people quitting makes a difference as it challenges those at big tech companies to move towards different business models. More immediately, he sees personal benefits in disconnecting and asserting your individuality (“being a cat”).

Has this book convinced me to quit social media? For the most part no, but I do walk away from this book convinced that today’s social media platforms are far from ideal and seeing the need for change. I will continue to be on social media, partly I have social media accounts for this website to help to reach some of the people who might find these posts beneficial. I did recently decide to quit WhatsApp though, since I see no need to use a messaging app owned by (and sharing data with) Facebook when there are better, more private options available (eg. Signal ).

Founder and editor of mindful.technology. A software developer by profession, Justin's education and experience in technology may inform his writing, but he writes as an everyday user of technology, just like you.

• Subscribe to Newsletter

One thought on “ Jaron Lanier’s Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now ”

Many if not all forms of technology can be put noble or ignoble purposes. Maybe the problem here is that social media is in competition with broadcast and print media, not only for the public’s attention and influence, but advertising. Currently, classified advertising is free on Facebook. This used to be the financial lifeblood of newspapers. Jaron Lanier claims that Facebook re-programs your mind. That is exactly what reading newspapers does to you.They make an art form out of pressing emotional buttons. I have never been to the USA but many people tell me that the whole US media is one big propaganda machine. The problem with commercially owned media is one of commercial imperative. There was once a newspaper in the UK called the News Chronicle that was popular with readers but not advertisers. I take part in a FB group called Van Life Australia. I consider sharing your accumulated wisdom to be altruistic. I don’t see how taking part in such a group can be considered re-programming my mind. Joining an MLM scheme will re-program your mind and make you less happy. I don’t consider myself less happy since joining FB. I have however become happier since deleting membership of dating sites. They are full of fake profiles. Just do an image search with Google. Humans are social creatures. Some people you connect with and others you don’t. Question, if I share a thought with someone on FB messenger, will it be detrimental to my mental health, if so will it be detrimental to my mental health if I had do the same thing using SMS or email? Making friends later on in life is not so easy. Facebook can be a solution to staying in touch. What about the positive aspects of social media?I have seen one young man on a huge message-board. When he first started posting, he was at best semi-literate. His content was just regurgitated dogma. Every sentence was riddled with literacy defects. His final postings showed some original thought. There were no typos, spelling errors, punctuation errors, other grammatical errors or syntax errors. I think writing and getting into robust discussion can be beneficial to personal development. It is of course possible to find yourself in the wrong group. I once joined a skeptics group. I was looking forward to some thought provoking discussion. Instead I found the biggest bunch of reactionary , dogmatic, denialist bigots I ever came across. It seemed beyond their collective comprehension that science is full of controversy. Nothing skeptical about that lot at all. One guy there was 100% certain about AGW; 100% certain about the safety and efficacy of every vaccine ever produced past present and future; 100% certain that LDL cholesterol is the one and only cause of CVD. In his words, “There is no other plausible explanation.”

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Before commenting, please take a moment to enjoy your breath. We welcome your thoughts, but ask that you only leave a comment where you feel you can contribute constructively to the conversation. If you simply want to show your appreciation, we would rather you share this article with friends instead.

If this is your first comment on mindful.technology, it will not be shown until approved.

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

Academia.edu no longer supports Internet Explorer.

To browse Academia.edu and the wider internet faster and more securely, please take a few seconds to  upgrade your browser .

Enter the email address you signed up with and we'll email you a reset link.

• We're Hiring!
• Help Center

The Ethics of Quitting Social Media

In Carissa Véliz (Ed.), Oxford Handbook of Digital Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press): 685-704

There are prima facie ethical reasons and prudential reasons for people to avoid or withdraw from social media platforms. But in response to pushes for people to quit social media, a number of authors have argued that there is something ethically questionable about quitting social media: that it involves — typically, if not necessarily — an objectionable expression of privilege on the part of the quitter. In this paper I contextualise privilege-based objections to quitting social media and explain the underlying principles and assumptions that feed into these objections. I show how they misrepresent the kind of act people are performing in quitting, in part by downplaying its role in promoting reforms in communication systems and technologies. And I suggest that this misrepresentation is related to a more widespread, and ultimately insidious, tendency to think of recently-established technological states of affairs as permanent fixtures of our society.

Related Papers

Nathanael Bassett

Among non-users of ICT are those who make a deliberate choice to disengage with social media. These “rejectors” follow a contemporary trend of disconnection and justify their decisions through confessional messages. The question of their motives leads to a need for analysis of those confessions to understand why people chose to depart or disconnect from social networking sites. In this study, four themes emerge which do not completely follow motivations suggested by other literature.

Internet Research

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to investigate the motivations, concerns, benefits and consequences associated with non-use of social media. In doing so, it extends Wyatt's commonly used taxonomy of non-use by identifying new dimensions in which to understand non-use of social media. This framework encompasses a previously unidentified category of non-use that is critical to understand in today's social media environment. Design/methodology/approach: This is an exploratory interview study with 17 self-identified social media non-users distributed across age groups and socioeconomic backgrounds. A thematic analysis is conducted based on a novel extension of Wyatt's framework and the risk-benefits framework. This is supplemented by open coding to allow for emerging themes. Findings: This paper provides empirical insights into a formerly uninvestigated population of non-users who are prevented from using social media because of social engagement (rather than functional) barriers. It identifies how these individuals face social consequences both on and off social media, resulting in social disenfranchisement. Research limitations/implications: This is an initial exploration of the phenomenon using an interview study. For generalizability, future research should investigate non-use with a broader and random sample. Practical implications-This paper includes design recommendations and implications for social media platform designers to mitigate the consequences experienced by socially disenfranchised non-users. Social implications: Addressing concerns of this newly identified class of non-users is of utmost importance. As others are increasingly connected, these non-users are left behind and even ostracized-showing the dark sides of social media use and non-use. Originality/value: This work identifies types of non-use of social media previously unrecognized in the literature.

Maria Stadnicka

In 2018, the Cambridge Analytica political scandal revealed that over 87 million Facebook users had their personal data misused. The information was accessed by political parties without the users’ consent, with a significant impact on the result of the United States’ elections in 2016, as well as the Brexit Referendum in the United Kingdom. The phenomenon re-opened the discussion about the social media’s function in creating the ‘necessary illusion of freedom’ (Chomsky, 1988). Moreover, Cambridge Analytica mediatic crisis prompted the unprecedented #DeleteFacebook campaign. This paper reviews the impact of #DeleteFacebook on internet users’ access to services and websites (Griffin, 2018). Furthermore, the discussion reveals the emergence of a ‘hyper-connectivity paradox’, leading to ‘status anxiety’ (de Botton, 2005) generated by a diluted sense of self and fear of rejection.

Jonathan Surovell

According to rigorous psychological measures, social media do more harm than good. And because social media use our posts to become more irresistible to our friends, using them can make our friends crave something that's bad for them. So, we should opt out.

Reform Magazine (51)

Arif Nugroho

The 21st century has been the witness of information technology’s rapid development. One evidently popular product of the advancement is the social media. Social media is the platforms that enable the interactive web by engaging users to participate in, comment on and create content as means of communicating with their social graph, other users and the public (Cohen, 2011). It is undeniable truth that social media makes a huge contribution in providing the easiness for human life, since it enables people to communicate, interact, and share something to other people around the world only by connecting to the Internet. It begins with the era of Friendster and MySpace, then followed by Facebook and Twitter, and recently Instagram, Path, and Snapchat which attract a great number of users. By the day, people are more addicted to the use of the social media. Almost all activities that they do every day cannot be separated from social media - even their first thing to do after waking up is checking their social media. That is why the existence of social media has changed the lifestyle of human life.

Social Media + Society

Social media are among many tools that people use to articulate culture. However, it must be remembered that social media are websites that afford community building regardless of the morality, social benefit, or social detriment of the communities that get built. At their core, social media sites are products created by their respective corporations with the intent of monetizing the labor of their users. The values that these sites might offer are dependent on the users and the users’ ability to claim some social benefit. In this regard, the author argues that social media can be beneficial spaces where society articulates and records culture “only if” users can maintain that use despite corporate actors’ efforts to monetize users’ labor.

Jarosław Chodak

Not very long ago, Kaplan and Haenlein (2010) announced that “Today, everything is about Social Media”. The meaning of this statement is straightforward – if you do not have an account on social media platform, you are out of online domain. Nowadays, this claim appears to be soft or even out of date. It is more likely that if you do not have an account on social media, you are absent both online and offline. Whether we like it or not, the explosive growth of social media has changed the ways modern society is conceptualized, diagnosed, and examined. By sharing, liking, commenting, tweeting, rating, following up etc. users have established new communicational practices spreading beyond social media into a wider social context. Television viewers use Twitter to express live their emotions evoked by presidential candidates debating on controversial issues. Tourists take ‘selfies’ and put them on Instagram to share a wonderful holiday they have. Headhunters use LinkedIn to find candidat...

Studies of Transition States and Societies

Ramona-Riin Dremljuga

This article examines millennials' experience of platform-specific disconnection, focusing on the ambiguous intersection of engagement and disengagement with social media. Drawing on 16 semi-structured interviews with (non)users 1 who have quit specific social media platforms while remaining users on other platforms, this study addresses a specific practice of social media disengagement as a phenomenon, regardless of the (non)users' demographics. As a result, the study introduces phases leading up to platform-specific disconnection, which can extend to, or derive from, other practices of media rejection and resistance. These different stages refer to the technical and social affordances that influence users in their decision to (dis)engage with specific platforms, revealing a bias between the perception of the phenomenon and the lived experience of the disconnected. By visualizing the process of platform-specific disengagement, this paper provides novel insight into media resistance and non-use, and challenges the misconception of disconnecting in the digital age.

E-Learning and Digital Media

James Reveley

The opportunities social media provide for agential expressions of subjectivity and experiential learning, relative to social media's role in reproducing digital-era capitalism, are the subject of keen debate. There is now a burgeoning academic literature which suggests that social media users are, to a greater or lesser degree, alienated by the activities of mega-corporations like Google and Facebook. Within this literature two broad perspectives are clearly identifiable. The first insists that social media platforms strongly alienate their users. To the extent that critical media scholars who advance this proposition are preoccupied with ideological hegemony, their work emblematises the idealist tendency of (old) media theorists that Dallas W. Smythe criticises. Contributors to the second perspective posit a trade-off between social media user alienation and exploitation. Not only is this idea inherently problematical, it does not go far enough towards resetting the analysis o...

Loading Preview

Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above.

RELATED PAPERS

New Media & Society

Laura Portwood-Stacer

Richard Mocarski

Language & Communication

Jessica S Robles

ACR North American Advances

Andrea Tonner

Ibra Haumara

Giampaolo Azzoni

Jessica S Robles , Stephen M DiDomenico

Ágoston Fáber

Richard Fitzgerald

Triplec Communication Capitalism Critique Open Access Journal For a Global Sustainable Information Society

Bjarki Valtysson

Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology

Lee Humphreys

Emad Khazraee , Kristene Unsworth

Majid KhosraviNik , Johnny Unger

New Global Studies

Massimo Ragnedda

Baha Abu-Shaqra

Grant Bollmer

Digital Change and Marginalized Communities: Changing Attitudes towards Digital Media in the Margins

Gen Eickers , Matthias O . Rath

Eran Fisher

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Mahmoud Eid

Crossroads in New Media, Identity and Law

Eugenia Siapera

Teachers College Record: The Voice of Scholarship in Education

Kaitlin Torphy

RELATED TOPICS

•   We're Hiring!
•   Help Center
• Find new research papers in:
• Health Sciences
• Earth Sciences
• Cognitive Science
• Mathematics
• Computer Science
• Academia ©2024

• Share full article

Advertisement

Supported by

Student Opinion

Would You Quit Social Media?

By Shannon Doyne

• Feb. 5, 2018

Do you use social media? If so, would you ever consider disconnecting from a particular platform you use now, or leaving all your social media feeds entirely? What do you think you would gain or lose?

In the Opinion essay “ I Quit Twitter and It Feels Great ,” Lindy West writes about quitting Twitter more than a year ago:

To be clear, it’s not brave to quit Twitter, or righteous (I’m still on Facebook, which is just a differently shaped moral stockyard), or noteworthy. Quitting Twitter is just a thing that you can do. I mention it only because there was a time when I didn’t think it was a thing that I could do, and then I did it, and now my life is better. I’m frequently approached by colleagues, usually women, who ask me about quitting Twitter with hushed titillation, as if I’ve escaped a cult or broken a particularly seductive taboo. Well, here’s what my new life is like: I don’t wake up with a pit in my stomach every day, dreading what horrors accrued in my phone overnight. I don’t get dragged into protracted, bad-faith arguments with teenage boys about whether poor people deserve medical care, or whether putting nice guys in the friend zone is a hate crime. I don’t spend hours every week blocking and reporting trolls and screen-grabbing abuse in case it someday escalates into a credible threat. I no longer feel like my brain is trapped in a centrifuge filled with swastikas and Alex Jones’s spittle. Time is finite, and now I have more of it. At the same time, I know this conversation is more complicated than that. I’ve lost a large platform to self-promote and make professional connections, which isn’t something many writers can afford to give up (less established writers and marginalized writers most of all — in a horrid irony, the same writers disproportionately abused on Twitter). I get my news on a slight delay. I seethe at the perception that I ceded any ground to trolls trying to push me out. I will probably never persuade RuPaul to be my friend. Also, I loved Twitter. Twitter is funny and smart and validating and cathartic. It feels, when you are embroiled in it, like the place where everything is happening. (Scoff if you like, but the president of the United States makes major policy announcements there. This is the world now.)

Students: Read the entire essay, then tell us:

— What are your thoughts on the experiences Ms. West says she’s had while using Twitter and after she stopped using her account?

— Is Twitter a form of social media that you use regularly? What other platforms do you use? Are there any you’d consider quitting? Why?

We are having trouble retrieving the article content.

Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and  log into  your Times account, or  subscribe  for all of The Times.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

Already a subscriber?  Log in .

Want all of The Times?  Subscribe .

People Who Deleted Their Social Media Share What It’s Like

Senior Lifestyle Reporter, HuffPost

Last month, Chrissy Teigen , the queen of online clapbacks, did something wholly unexpected: She left Twitter . (The model-turned-cookbook-author is so influential on the platform, she was dubbed the “Mayor of Twitter” by the company itself.)

“It’s time for me to say goodbye,” she wrote to her more than 14 million followers. “This no longer serves me as positively as it serves me negatively, and I think that’s the right time to call something.” (Update: On April 16, 23 days after leaving, the model announced she was returning to Twitter . Old clapback habits die hard!)

Kate Rosenblatt , a therapist and senior clinical manager at online therapy platform Talkspace , said that in recent months, many clients have deleted their social media or taken similar extended digital detoxes. Digital minimalism, they’re realizing, can do wonders for your mental health.

“Post-pandemic, one year later, many clients have shared that since they’ve drastically increased their social media use this past year due to quarantine, they’re finding now is a great time to experiment with a digital detox,” Rosenblatt told HuffPost. “The vaccine is here and the world is slowly opening up again, so they can begin connecting with people safely IRL.”

Still, logging off for good ― or even temporarily, to give your brain a much-needed break ― isn’t easy. You don’t have to be an “extremely online” person to have become extremely addicted to the “likes” that pour in when you post a selfie, or the compliments you get when you humble brag about a work win.

“We know from research that seeing ‘likes’ or comments on our posts is correlated with our brains releasing dopamine in the reward areas,” Rosenblatt said. “It feels good physiologically.”

“I know I will never look back and think, ‘Gosh, I wish I had spent more time on social media.’” - Jody, a 40-year-old who left Instagram and Facebook

This can create a constant craving for those quick dopamine hits. Just like that, we’re spending hours on social media, constantly scrolling and posting, which in the long term is a detriment to our mental health, Rosenblatt said.

But what does it feel like to go off platform when you’re addicted to scrolling? Below, readers who’ve done it share what it was like for them to hop off social media, what challenges they faced, and how it affected their friendships and mental health.

Note: Responses have been lightly edited for style and clarity.

“I had already stopped using Facebook years ago, but the events of last spring and summer led to my decision to delete Instagram: Ahmaud Arbery ’s death, then Breonna Taylor and then George Floyd , coupled with the pandemic and losing my father-in-law in April 2020 to COVID-19 . My algorithm was filled with social and political injustices with a spattering of friends’ posts. I was increasingly anxious , constantly refreshing my feed to follow the latest police shooting, COVID death number or how many kids were separated at the border . What I discovered was that anytime there was a ‘lull,’ I would scroll, such as during an active text convo while waiting for a response. My last scroll was Sept. 18, 2020, when Ruth Bader Ginsburg died. At one point, I thought I would like Instagram better if I created a new account, but that didn’t last. I deleted the app altogether.

Without IG, I sleep better, my mind feels lighter. I feel less anxious, less angry, and better able to organize my thoughts around what can be done with regard to social and political injustices rather than just being mad. I feel the gloom and doom is more manageable. And my friends are supportive. I have to make an added effort to check in with them via text, which feels more meaningful to me.

It makes me feel ‘old’ to disconnect, but I guess I am old(er), and being on social media isn’t going to change that. I now see the way it drove me to increase consumption and compare myself to impossible filtered and Photoshopped standards.”

“What made me decide to delete my social media was the overwhelming negativity that just seemed to circulate around the apps, Facebook specifically. I deleted it about two weeks ago, after years of being very active and having a lot of friends on the app.

Before, Facebook somewhat consumed my life. I found myself getting affected by a ton of drama that circulated around a friend’s death. I thought maybe a death would bring all of us together, but it really just turned into this nasty string of arguments, pain and grief. I decided that I just could not take it anymore, so I deleted the Facebook app off of both my iPhone and iPad.

My mental health has improved drastically. Although I still spend quite a bit of my time on my phone, as most 21-year-olds do, I find myself not feeling as stressed or pressured when I post things on Reddit. My friends and family supported my decision, because of course I still talk to them and update them on my life. Overall, I’m not regretful of my decision in the slightest.”

“I was plugged into all of the typical outlets: Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter from their early days until the fallout of the 2016 US presidential election . I lean conservative, and I grew tired of promoted articles and advertisements regularly promoting a worldview to which I did not conform. I was additionally inundated with vitriolic and spiteful posts from friends and colleagues aimed at conservatives. As I was (and am) in the closet regarding my beliefs, I became afraid of the social and professional backlash I’d receive if somebody caught wind of my ideology.

When I deleted my accounts, I made sure to first download all photos and videos posted by me so that they wouldn’t be permanently lost. Not knowing I could do so earlier was one of the barriers that prevented me from leaving these platforms sooner.

I did initially lament the lack of contact I would have with old acquaintances and colleagues (as did they), but over time I realized that those who are truly important to me will stay in touch regardless. In the intervening years, I have set up shell accounts with fake names on Facebook and Instagram that I rarely use-they are mostly for Marketplace shopping and keeping in touch with groups I’m an active member of. But I don’t see myself ever returning in a greater capacity than that.

I find that I have considerably higher productivity and less overall screen time these days. My worldview and political thoughts are more nuanced and less inflammatory than those of my peers. Most importantly, I’m free to live in the moment and experience the real world around me. As it turns out, the air is sweet, your neighbors are good people, and most humans have a desire to leave the world better than they found it.”

“I had Facebook and Instagram for years. I deleted all of my ‘friends’ about four years ago. I would say I left to have less negativity in my life; there were so many ‘fake’ people and relationships on there. I didn’t delete Facebook entirely because I still use it for groups and Marketplace ― but I don’t use it for any personal postings or followings. IG I did not delete either at first, but I took occasional breaks that became more often and lasted longer until I quit for good last summer.

Before I unfollowed everyone on Facebook, I shared a post saying I was deleting everyone and if they wanted to stay in touch they could via Messenger or I could give them my number and we could text. As expected, very few reached out, but I knew those who did were my people, my real circle.

I don’t feel like I’m missing out on anything because what’s most important to me is what’s right in front of me: my kids, my close friends and family. I still have all of that. It actually means even more to me now. Life is short. With the pandemic, I think that’s a lesson more people are realizing now. I know I will never look back and think, ‘Gosh, I wish I had spent more time on social media.’”

Zufayri, 22

“Around November last year, I decided to delete all my social media in a ‘detox’: Instagram, TikTok and Twitter. I did it because I find myself comparing myself to my friends on there and it clearly made me unhappy and not satisfied with myself. I also made this decision because I started getting into minimalism and one of the ways to achieve minimalism is to stop comparing yourself to others.

It had a positive impact on me ... or that’s what I thought initially. For the first three days, I noticed that I used my phone less and my battery lasted longer. It felt refreshing at first because I found myself doing productive things: cleaning, reading and also writing. But as the days went by, I started to be anxious because I couldn’t really keep up with new trends. Basically I was missing out on the latest news and ‘tea.’ My friends would personally DM me posts on Instagram and once they knew I was doing a social media detox, they shared stuff with me via text so that I didn’t miss out on current trends. No one I knew was particularly upset because I explained the reason I did the detox.

I ended up reinstalling my social media back because the fear of missing out kicked in. Would I do it again? Absolutely.”

“I’ve been taking incremental steps away from social media over the years, mainly because I wanted to find time for reading and writing. Initially, I turned off my notifications but I still checked compulsively. So I deleted my apps and used mobile web instead. I swapped my big-screen Samsung for a BlackBerry Key2 and I scrapped Facebook and Twitter. I haven’t deleted my Instagram account yet, but I’m not using it any longer. I moved from WhatsApp to Telegram too, mainly on principle .

I think these apps are divisive, addictive and unethical. It’s hardly breaking news either. Removing them has given me the headspace to see the wider picture. Unless you’re reminding your followers you exist (via stories, likes, tweets, etc.), people will forget about you. But that’s OK. The folks in my life right now feel closer. Rather than dishing out ‘press releases’ to the masses, we’ll trade pictures and anecdotes directly. It’s less about our egos, more about experiences.

Social media is a tool. We should use it if it benefits us. Everybody says we need an online brand or persona for employment prospects but if it stresses you out and hinders your creativity, seek alternatives. For instance, Goodreads encourages me to read and Letterboxd is a great way to discover films. Books and films end, whereas your Instagram feed keeps washing over you forever ― it’s designed to addict you. Make decisions. Think for yourself. Don’t just eat up the algorithm. (It’s called a feed for a reason.)”

“I am a physician and minimalist composer, and used Facebook mainly to try to get my music out there, communicate with musicians and other composers and keep up with a number of friends and acquaintances. At one point I easily had nearly 2,000 ‘friends.’ Some of them I got to meet in person, but many I have never actually met to this day. Some people I ended up unfriending because it became clear that they harbored racist views or were otherwise not helping to make FB a positive experience.

After an unpleasant experience with a consultant who did not take kindly to my private message about her support of a white supremacist (Trump) in early 2017 as well as the Cambridge Analytica scandal, I completely quit FB around 2018 and have not looked back. I became convinced that FB was, in essence, a criminal enterprise, and the intervening years have only made that even more clear. While I am still active on Twitter (mainly to keep in touch with a good friend as well as to be able to quickly contact American Airlines since I fly a lot for work and sometimes it is the quickest way to get information and action) and Instagram, I am glad I am not on Facebook. My wife is still on social media so she keeps me filled in about people we both know, so it is very manageable in that regard.”

“I gave up social media for Lent, including Facebook, Instagram, two Twitter accounts, several Discords and a private forum. I was scrolling through all of them endlessly. I’d put down my iPad for the night, go to bed, pick up my iPhone, and just continue browsing crap.

I read more books, which was nice, and I finished a couple projects I’d been putting off for too long. I kept in touch with friends mostly via phone calls while walking the dog.

The problem is, I have a five-month-old baby, and he can be completely exhausting some days, and on those days I just need a way to completely turn off my brain for a couple hours. Without social media I fell into a habit of reading the world’s dumbest listicles on you-know-which-sites while watching reruns. It wasn’t an improvement. So the result of this Lent was mixed. Some accounts I’ll delete permanently, but for others I’ll just trim them down and keep around.”

Mehret , 26

“It was 2011 when I first noticed the insistent pull social media had on my attention. I asked a friend to use her phone to check my Facebook. After checking my notifications, I give the phone back. Right away, I want to check my Facebook again. That didn’t feel right to me. The more I paid attention, the more I realized how overbearing this was on my time, attention and life. I was angry that my productivity and mental health were being compromised just to see what people had for lunch. I deleted Facebook shortly after, then I deleted Instagram, Snapchat, Tumblr and Twitter. I was off social media for three years from 2017 to 2020.

Quitting social media was the best decision of my life. It allowed me to live life to the beat of my own drum. It’s a very freeing feeling. When I’m doing things, I don’t care to capture the perfect picture or think about how it will look online. I’m fully present in the moment. Take a break. Social media can wait. Life cannot. Rediscover the pleasures of the offline world.”

From Our Partner

Huffpost shopping’s best finds, more in life.

• A Beginner’s Guide to IELTS
• Common Grammar Mistakes [for IELTS Writing Candidates]

Writing Correction Service

• Free IELTS Resources
• Practice Speaking Test

Select Page

Quitting Social Media

Posted by David S. Wills | May 18, 2018 | TED Video Lessons | 0

Are you a social media addict? In the 21st century, it seems that most of us are addicted to our smartphones. More than a billion people use Facebook, and hundreds of millions more are glued to Twitter, Instagram, and WeChat. Social media is everywhere but is it damaging our lives? Some people say yes; others say no. Dr. Cal Newport reckons that staying off social media is beneficial for a number of reasons.

Watch and Listen

Let’s do a little vocabulary practice. Here’s a short PPT with some of the words that he uses. If you download it and play it in Microsoft Powerpoint, you can try to guess the word before it appears at the top of the screen. This will help you to remember it better. 🙂

Listen to the beginning of the talk and fill in the gaps below, using no more than three words. (Answers are at the bottom of the page.)

All right. So you probably don’t realize that right now you’re actually looking at something quite rare, because I’m a ___1___ computer scientist book author standing on a TED stage and yet I’ve never had a _____2_____. How this happened was actually somewhat random. Social media first came onto my radar when I was at college, my ____3____ of college. This was when Facebook arrived at our campus. And at the time which was right after the first dot-com bust, I had had a _____4____, I have had to shut it down in the bust. And then suddenly this other kid from Harvard named Mark had this product called Facebook and people were getting excited about it. So sort of a fit of somewhat immature ____5____ jealousy I said I’m not going to use this thing, I’m not going to help this get business — See, as I go along my life, I look up not long later and I see that everyone I know is really ____6___ this thing and from the clarity you can get when you have some objectivity, some perspective on it, I realized this seems a little bit dangerous. So I never _____7_____. I’ve never had a social media account since.

The topic of social media – which is a mix of society and technology – could appear in the IELTS writing exam, so be prepared. Most likely it would occur in task 2. Let’s look at a question that’s very similar to Dr. Newport’s lecture:

Many people believe that effect of social media on both individuals and society has been negative. To what extent do you agree or disagree?

The question is pretty simple – decide whether you agree or disagree that social media’s effects are negative, and then argue your point. I would structure my essay like this:

• refine topic
• essay outline
• conclusion – paraphrase introduction and revisit body paragraphs

Here’s a video I made about analyzing and answering IELTS task 2 questions:

Sample Answer

Here’s my model essay:

In the last decade, social media has become vitally important to billions of people around the globe. However, despite bring people closer together, it has divided opinion and now many people think that its effects are negative. This essay will argue that social media is a force for good in this world, despite the problems it brings. Although many people criticize social media companies for using people’s data and causing addiction, they provide a service that was previously unavailable to people. Prior to the internet, people had to use phones to communicate, and before that it was letters. Nowadays a mother can contact her children working on the other side of the world, and friendships can be formed across vast distances. Social media gives us this connection between people that even e-mail could not rival, and that is one reason why it is a positive thing. Another reason in support of social media as a force for good is that although the companies tend to attract criticize for their size and power, they provide a platform for small businesses. In all parts of the globe, men and women can operate small businesses more easily by advertising and selling on social media. Facebook and Twitter allow their users to target potential customers in a way that was never before possible. For cash-strapped businesses, this tool is invaluable. In conclusion, social media may have its faults, but its benefits to humanity outweigh those negative features. By bringing people together and lending a helping hand to small business owners, social media networks are making the world a better place. Word count: 266

So… how do you feel about social media? In the video we heard arguments against it, and in the essay we read arguments for it. Let us know in the comments which side you are on. If you are a social media user, check out the TED-IELTS Facebook and Twitter pages. We also have a Facebook group now. Are you a Redditor? We’re also on Reddit . 😉

• social media account
• sophomore year
• dorm room business
• professional

About The Author

David S. Wills

David S. Wills is the author of Scientologist! William S. Burroughs and the 'Weird Cult' and the founder/editor of Beatdom literary journal. He lives and works in rural Cambodia and loves to travel. He has worked as an IELTS tutor since 2010, has completed both TEFL and CELTA courses, and has a certificate from Cambridge for Teaching Writing. David has worked in many different countries, and for several years designed a writing course for the University of Worcester. In 2018, he wrote the popular IELTS handbook, Grammar for IELTS Writing and he has since written two other books about IELTS. His other IELTS website is called IELTS Teaching.

Related Posts

How to Stay Calm When You Know You’ll Be Stressed

July 24, 2018

High-Altitude Wind Energy from Kites, by Saul Griffith

October 25, 2016

The Chemistry of Cookies [IELTS Listening Practice]

December 10, 2020

Angela Lee Duckworth: Grit: The power of passion and perseverance

August 8, 2017

Leave a reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed .

Download my IELTS Books

Recent Posts

• Do the Advantages Outweigh the Disadvantages? – Advice About This Question Type
• Exams vs Continual Assessement [Model Essay]
• British vs American Spelling
• How to Improve your IELTS Writing Score
• Past Simple vs Past Perfect

Recent Comments

• David S. Wills on Writing Correction Service
• raquel on Writing Correction Service
• Lesson Plans
• Model Essays
• TED Video Lessons
• Weekly Roundup

Quit Social Media

Anti-Social Grumblings

I recently gave a deliberatively provocative TEDx talk titled “quit social media” (see the video above). The theme of the event was “visions of the future.” I said my vision of the future was one in which many fewer people use social media.

Earlier this week, Andrew Sullivan published a long essay in New York Magazine  that comes at this conclusion from a new angle.

Sullivan, as you might remember, founded the sharp and frenetic political blog, The Daily Dish (ultimately shortened to:  The Dish ). The blog was a success but its demands were brutal.

For a decade and a half, I’d been a web obsessive, publishing blog posts multiple times a day, seven days a week…My brain had never been so occupied so insistently by so many different subjects and in so public a way for so long.

In recent years, his health began to fail. “Did you really survive HIV to die of the web?”, his doctor asked.  Finally, in the winter of 2015, he quit, explaining: “I decided, after 15 years, to live in reality.”

This might sound like an occupational hazard of a niche new media job, but a core argument of Sullivan’s essay is that these same demands have gone mainstream:

And as the years went by, I realized I was no longer alone. Facebook soon gave everyone the equivalent of their own blog and their own audience. More and more people got a smartphone — connecting them instantly to a deluge of febrile content, forcing them to cull and absorb and assimilate the online torrent as relentlessly as I had once. Twitter emerged as a form of instant blogging of microthoughts. Users were as addicted to the feedback as I had long been — and even more prolific.

As he summarizes: “the once-unimaginable pace of the professional blogger was now the default for everyone.”

As I noted in my talk, one of the most common rationales for social media use is that it’s harmless — why miss out on the interesting connection or funny ephemera it might occasionally bring your way?

Sullivan’s essay is a 6000 word refutation of this belief. Social media is not harmless. It can make your life near unlivable.

Sullivan attempts to end with a note of optimism, saying “we are only beginning to get our minds around the costs,” before adding a more resigned coda: “if we are even prepared to accept that there are costs.”

I agree that we’re not yet ready to fully face this reality, and cheeky TED talks by curmudgeonly young professors like me probably won’t move the needle. But when heavyweights like Sullivan join the conversation, I can begin to feel a cautious optimism grow.

74 thoughts on “Quit Social Media”

Social Media has helped me to create and maintain new friendships. Otherwise we would all be stuck with our friends from high school or our neighbors. People need to meet like minded people and they usually don’t live next door, thus social media can help you find them and build whatever relationship you want to build. SM is also a great tool for raising Political awareness. Politicians cannot hide like they did in the past, voters now are more informed. While i totally agree with you that SM can be very unproductive and people do need to take their own actions, i do not agree with the “Quit it all” approach.

I lean more towards ” its the way you use it approach”. Social Media is still young, Facebook is only 12, so it is still a child. I prefer to judge adults, not children because children are not “finished products”. What i am saying that, as SM mature, people will too and eventually will apply best practices on their usage time, the number of people they connect with, the amount of info they receive and its quality. After all, i heard about you through Social Media. I wouldn’t have discovered you without them. So, another question rises: How people found out about you? How did you become popular in the first place? And how can a business replicate your success in the online world if you advice it, not having a presence on SM? Should businesses stop advertising on SM as well?

Social media allows the great stratification of our world to continue at warp speed. Better to spend ones time with a kindred spirit a thousand miles away thant to know ones neighbor.

I’m old enough to remember airports before cell phones where one either read, or struck up a conversation with a stranger. No TV blaring the latest headlines ad nausea, no folks with headphones having what use to pass for imaginary conversations with themselves. Today, it’s just a bunch of folks living in the bubble that they carry around with them everywhere they go.

I love my smart phone. I enjoy all the information that’s available to me wherever I’m at. But what we are losing in the current trade off is significant and for the most part slipping silently under the waterline.

We can know our neighbors and enjoy technology.

I think one point that Cal has made previously is that when you create good work that is rare and valuable, people will find you. Another scholar, Imam Siraj Wahaj, put this really eloquently in a way that resonated with me: If you create a beautiful and useful building in the middle of the forest, people will build a path to find it.

I agree with Cal that social media is a major deterrent against deep focused work, because I can see the day-to-day effects of it in myself. I have played around with starting a business by marketing extensively on social media, but it is ridiculous how much time and effort is put into that process with furiously little reward to show for it. If you say then that I needed to gain better “social media marketing” skills, then really that’s another ridiculous amount of time spent listening to webinars and lectures with an extremely low pay-off in the end. Instead, I could be better using my time working on the actual service and content I want to provide.

When we are starting off new career projects and business start-ups, I believe it is vital that we focus entirely on creating “rare and valuable” work. Yes, it is important to garner feedback on whether your work truly is valuable, but there are much better ways to do that than testing it out via social media. Talking to people one-on-one, in real life, is going to get you much more valuable and comprehensive feedback than assessing how many views, likes, reactions, and retweets your content is getting on social media.

That said, I too would love to hear more from Cal about how to effectively publicize our content and garner attention, without gambling with social media campaigns.

Well Said Arooj ! If only we could focus on working on the product itself ! I Really Resonate with you point and yes it brings so much focus being offline.

I see where you are coming from, but it is a naive point. Marketing has been around long before SM and will continue long after. Businesses didn’t suddenly become successful because they were able to buy ad time from facebook and guarantee that facebook shove it down people’s throats. Word of mouth still holds the best form of advertising. Any business, restaurant or other establishment will always take word of mouth first because there is a personal story behind it.

As far as meeting people, there are many ways to meet people. And then even more ways to connect with them through mail, email, actual telephone conversations. The people whom I’m FB friends with I know far less than compared to the people I work with who are not my facebook friends. It’s just a collection of random people you meet, friend and forget. It’s far more personal to actually send a real email or letter to somebody than just ‘like’ or share their SM posts.

I found Cal when I googled the book CDP Grey recommended on his Q&A on YouTube. “So Good They Can’t Ignore You,” The book literally ended a decade streak of jadedness in my life in regards to work since I left the Marines. YouTube only got me so far, it was the meat of the book that won me over.

Having read Deep Work and complimentary books like Essentialism and The ONE Thing have me seriously thinking about an exit strategy from “social media.” I have already turned off notifications as they are intrusive yet seductively addictive to get that next hit of dopamine. Thanks for recommending Sullivan’s article.

I removed the apps from my iPhone and iPad, and now only use the web-form of the apps on Safari. This seems like a small change and negligible, but some interesting patterns emerged: 1) Web versions of the sites are less appealing than their App-based brethren (which, as Cal probably suspects in Deep Work, are built purely for their addictive-like activation) 2) Because it takes a couple extra steps to pull up the site, wait for log-in confirmation, poor resolution, etc. I’m now less inclined to open the app on anything but a laptop or desktop computer. Usually this is either early morning or later in the evening.

I won’t be ditching social media soon, but am progressively making my way towards such practices. And I guess that’s really the point: make your practice to use social media as a seasoning to your day and not a main ingredient.

Mr. Newport,

I especially resonated with your comment about how you would have been happy as a farmer living in the 1930s. While I am not old enough to have experienced the ’30s directly, I did experience the lifestyle you described during summers–in late 1950 through the mid-’60s–on my grandparents’ farm in South Carolina. Up early, outside chores, breakfast afterward. More chores (my preference was to help my grandfather spread manure, but my grandmother insisted she needed help hanging the laundry on the line), a big lunch (we called it “dinner”), a little nap, then time for the cows to come home–well, up to the barn anyway–where I finally got to help my grandfather by putting feed in the trough. Supper was light, usually leftovers from lunch. No point in firing up the stove again just when the day was beginning to cool down. Then we all sat in the living room: my grandfather in his big red chair, reading the paper or the latest issue of Progressive Farmer. My grandmother and I, and any other siblings or cousins who were also visiting, would play word games. My grandparents did have a radio, a huge console contraption, but no TV. No A/C either. Once the night air had cooled off the house, it was time for bed.

Even though the nearest neighbor was about a half mile down the road, we didn’t lack for social interaction. Fellow farmers were always dropping by with some freshly churned butter, or some home-cured ham, or some vegetables that were still warm from the sunshine.

Sometimes after that afternoon nap, we would go visiting. There were rituals involved with that activity as well. If my grandmother brought a homemade pound cake for the occasion, then the person being called on would supply the jam or the fruit. And we had to change out of our work clothes, which didn’t necessarily mean a bath, but at the very least it meant clean socks. The conversation usually began with a bit of gossip; face-to-face book, if you will, but then moved on to finding out how everything was going on the respective farms.

I’m beginning to digress, so I’ll stop here. You have probably guessed I am in total agreement with you about being happy as a 1930s farmer. I was!

Janet Oliver

I loved the description and the face-to-face book (ha)! 🙂 What lovely memories you have. Thanks for sharing.

Honestly, I happily poop all over social media. It’s the Jerry Springer Show of the Web. On the other hand, I will happily spend time with content that is useful by inspiring or informing me. Thus, as a workaday generalist photographer I find the Visual Science Lab blog of pro photographer Kirk Tuck endlessly useful. And for sheer good writing + usefulness, give me calnewport.com/blog or Coding Horror. Long-form content has ruled, does rule, will rule wherever readership IQ rises above 24.

I think it’s possible to use social media without over using it. I came to social media late and even now I don’t use it as much as others. I would never give social media up altogether. It’s a way for me to connect with others and frankly to have a little fun, at times.

I think you have to be mature enough to know when enough is enough. I don’t think you’re any happier than I am because you don’t use social media at all. I think I am pretty happy, productive person. I simply know when enough is enough.

Thank you for this.

You mention reading books. Can you please share your process for finding non-fiction books?

I think the plethora of books available are themselves a distraction, as most of them are hype, and can even fill us with misconceptions.

How do you find the rare gem, or figure out if a book is worth your time? (separate signal from noise)

Cal – Can you also please recommend how you choose your toothpaste?

What an unhelpful contribution to the discussion. Try again, but this time with kindness?

Thank you for this blog, for your TED Talk, and for your books, especially DEEP WORK. I am a 55 year old writer with 2 finance books published under another name, plus 4 literary books, plus an anthology– all of which is to say, I understand the nature and immense benefits of deep work. But dealing with the Internet… that has been a challenge for me over the past several years, and especially when all these shiny new social media toys seemed to be so necessary and (apparently) effective for promoting one’s books. Every publicist, marketing staff, my fellow writers, all seem slaves now to social media. I can assure you, every writers conference has a panel on book PR and social media. For a while, at the enthusiastic urging of one of my writer-friends, by the way, a best-selling and very fine historical novelist, I maintained a Facebook page, but when I realized what a time-suck it was, and how FB made it intentionally and so deviously addictive, I deactivated my account. I had also come to recognize that people addicted to FB, as seemed to be most of my “FB friends,” often as they might “like” and comment on my posts there, are not my readers. (My books require sustained focus; I admit, they can be challenging.) I deactivated my FB more than a year ago, and I breathe a sigh of relief about it every blessed day.

As for your book, DEEP WORK, much of what you say was already familiar to me from my own experience as a writer, but I appreciated the reminders, especially in light of these contemporary challenges to sustaining focus. What was especially interesting and intriguing to me was the new cognitive research you mention. Next time I teach a writing workshop you can be sure that DEEP WORK will be on the syllabus.

I am also a software Engineer, and I DO agree that Social Media is not NEEDED. However, I think this dude is still just butt hurt that he did not build the HUGE social media website that everyone is using.. Trust me, I can relate, There are Apps I won’t download on my phone for the same reason (because they got the same idea released before I did). It is only natural to be jealous. But to say that it is going to hurt you attention span is data that is limited AT BEST. I use Facebook only to chat to other people on line to stay in touch. It is a communications device.

I agree with the bit about SM being addictive. Yes we have a free will but once you have the bits of curiosity in your head from reading and seeing stuff, you can wander down a trail of information that you don’t need. So if time is what you need and deep work. Well, it waits or it gets shelved if you are not organised. I am new to your blog readings so I am pleased to have found out about you on SM and I will be reading Deep Work. I am a grandmother and I fear a little bit for my grandchildren being hooked up on SM. Thank goodness for sport and outdoor activities which they thrive on.

I personally don’t feel that social media is all bad. You can actually even use it as you use any tool. Admittedly, if you’re looking at funny cat videos it’s not going to be at all productive. But if you’re subscribing to, say, Facebook pages that have stimulating articles then I believe that it can even enhance your thought when you’re not working. I went back to Facebook recently, and I basically don’t follow any family or friends except for important ones. I use Facebook almost exclusively to look at articles that I feel are interesting. This might be a very unpopular post, but I know this to be a fact as I use Facebook every day in just this way.

“SM is also a great tool for raising Political awareness. Politicians cannot hide like they did in the past, voters now are more informed.”

The thing you have to be aware of, is that increased political awareness in one narrow field is also having to compete for people’s attention with cat vdieos, pornography, online shopping, auctions sites, online games, online news aggregation sites, celebrit gossip sites, forums, fitness videos etc etc etc. There is a world of limitless choice out there now. We’ve trnascended the information ecomonomy and we are now in the attention economy where it’s your attention that is bought and sold. The big question is, if someone sees the polical message at the start of their morning internet binge, will they even remember any of the detail after the complete their evening internet binge?

“I personally don’t feel that social media is all bad. You can actually even use it as you use any tool.”

When was the last time you used a tool that you felt compelled to use again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again even after you had completed the original task that you intended to use the tool for? I’ve never experienced anything like that using email, or a hammer, or a drill or MS Excel or Dropbox. Social Media is DESIGNED to be addicitive.

“Businesses didn’t suddenly become successful because they were able to buy ad time from facebook and guarantee that facebook shove it down people’s throats. Word of mouth still holds the best form of advertising. Any business, restaurant or other establishment will always take word of mouth first because there is a personal story behind it.”

I completely agree with you. You have to remember that these days however word of mouth is no longer always guaranteed to be a face-to-face communication between two individuals. It’s an email, a text message, a Tweet, a Facebook post or maybe a Skype call or a YouTube Video. All of those mediums could get lost in the ocean of unlimited information that is bombarding your very limited attention. A side effect of information overload is that you can’t remember everything. That instantly makes word of mouth less valuable than it used to be. Nevertheless, as I stated, it’s still the best form of advertising. To that end the customer experience IS your marketing.

Hi Cal, It was so eerie (and wonderful) seeing your post in my email this morning, I wrote this blog post last night and I’ve posted a link back to your post here in the comments of my post (and the green grass grows all around-all around). Thank you for this post, it lifted my heart to see you discussing this.

https://fleurtingwithdisaster.com/2016/09/20/anti-social-networking

Are you also including blogs as “social media”? I’m asking because the RSS symbol is on the presentation and including blogs on that definition is a hypocritical since, well, you have a blog. Maybe you’re referring to using feed readers?

I have found the utility/value of specialized groups on LinkedIn for subject area expertise. It’s helpful for me to understand and learn more from these specialists. However, like listservs, they’re easily overtaken by marketing. It’s refreshing when you can connect with people that generously give their knowledge in such forums, just like this one, Cal and fellow deep workers. I also agree with other posts that going from a brief conversation/mention to the actual books is a frequent vector for me.

You immediately note that your talk was “deliberately provocative” in the post. I wonder, however, if that kind of provocativeness doesn’t serve your stated goals of having less people use social media. I found your discussion of “any benefit” vs. “craftsman” approaches to social media in Deep Work to be much more valuable and relatable. With that said, maybe the only way we can really embrace the craftsman approach is to initially push provocative ideas.

Read the post and thanks for sharing the nice informative article.

After having been on a business trip whose main purpose was career networking, and having been continually chained to a smart phone anytime my eyes were open, it was very good to read this story of the cost of connectedness.

I have personally seen online social and gaming sites help disabled people, as well as more than one kid going through the awkward teenage years and separated from friends by a family move.

However, for me, the only social media that makes any sense presently is ResearchGate.

Aristotle preached “moderation in all things.”

Cal- I am a big fan for your work. One interesting and funny thing I noticed in your TEDx talk: A lady in the audience is constantly on her cellphone..it was kind of funny to watch her!

Congratulations on your TED Talk! I read this post from “Don’t Delay” Blog in Psychology Today

– “Facebocrastination: New Research on the Perils of Facebook”: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/dont-delay/201608/facebocrastination-new-research-the-perils-facebook

I thought you could be interested.

The world needs a longer exposition of Cal Newport’s ideas on healthy internet use.

Immediately, he congratulates himself on being some sort of “special creature” who hasn’t indulged in the temptations of social media. Newsflash: nobody cares. And implying that your generation is a group of mindless zombies without any direction in life because they can’t put their phones down is idiotic. This isn’t making us like you, or take what you say seriously in any capacity.To put it into terms apparently only my fellow millennial social media robots can understand, if you had a Facebook, we’d all unfriend you.

I have never heard anyone say that a lack of social media makes you a “hipster hermit hobo.” Strawman.

Don’t tell me not be be apart of my generation. I’m sorry, Cal, that you weren’t born in the 1950s where you could have listened to rock and roll against your parents permission, danced the Lindy Hop, and accused everyone of communist affiliations. But let’s be real, if you were born in that decade, you and your purist ideals probably would still listen to Frank Sinatra, stick to classic waltz, and try to get everyone to do the same.

Not marketable? Have you checked the net worth of the top YouTubers? Instagram stars are becoming professional models. Ad revenue is through the roof. And yes, maybe the work to be a professional social media star isn’t difficult and the content is repetitive, but there is a definite market for it. Are you really going to tell our generation that they can’t make money because you don’t think they work hard enough?

Social media is harmful? Okay, television rots your brain (50s). Radio emits harmful electromagnetic waves (40s). Rock and roll music is Satanic (60s). Hairspray is bad for the environment (80s). The arguments against “whatever the kids are into” have been around for practically all of the twentieth century. You’re not adding anything new. It’s a borrowed philosophy.

Hi Cal, love your thoughts and this movement towards reclaiming our selves and our time.

Thank you for sharing these ideas.

I just read an article I thought you would appreciate about Von Miller taking his game to it’s current amazing level by quitting social media before the Superbowl last year. It’s incredible what focused effort can do.

It is extremely helpful knowing more of the recent research done involving the effects of social media. After awhile of having a variety of social medias and using them quite often at a progressive pace I started noticing more and more how they were hurting me more than they were helping me. I just told myself that “its not that bad” and my other excuse was that I wanted to stay connected to friends and more aware of whats going on, which was pointed out in the talk. Social media helped me branch out and stay connected. I didn’t really think I could do those things with out it, and if I could I knew it wouldn’t be as easy. Starting earlier this year I started deleting social media for awhile to break the habit, my attention and peace of mind would start to improve but then I would re-downlaod the apps and the same habits and negative effects would continue. Since I have gone through that cycle a few times I have deleted them for good. I concluded it needs to stay like this for the most positive and beneficial outcome with my attention, anxiety, and peace of mind. Even though I have gained insight through these experiences it was really confirming to hear the research behind all of it as well as the educational approach taken on it. Its also easy to see how social media websites and apps are created to be addictive. The more you are on it the more money they make so companies make sure to maximize the potential for us to be addicted to it. I agree with everything you mentioned in the talk. I don’t think its impossible to manage your social media use in a healthy way, I just think it can be really difficult and in a sense setting yourself up for failure by taking that risk. Anyway I thank you for this talk!

I noticed that the length (not just number) of one’s posts/replies in forums tends to be proportional to the level of “addiction” to social media. Quite telling. And it keeps on getting worse as bandwidth and storage costs go down. Keep the digital minimal.

I use social media a LOT, thinking i was addicted to it. but then I see people who post a SCHEDULED amount of 20 posts minimum every day, meanwhile I just post when I have absolutely nothing else to do. It’s almost amazing how people can do that and some still have a relatively normal day with a job at the same time. However, I’ve noticed for those who spend an over-excessive amount on social media? the more time they spend, the more the chance they become over-sensitive about almost everything. It’s almost weird, one of my friends who I used to be best friends with can never take jokes anymore, the only “social media” he had when we became friends was Facebook and an mmorpg called “World of Warcraft”(i only played because my parents wanted me to be more “social, but people in real life in our small town hated me because i was always acting “odd” to them, so I had to use a game, but over time it really did help), used to make horribly mean but funny jokes all the time. Now he barely makes jokes and complains about every little thing like its the end of the world…

As a former party goer that was deep into the rave scene of the 90’s, I can’t help but notice the similarities between people who use hard drugs and people who use social media. Unfortunately some people have addictive personalities and can’t handle their drugs, whether of the pharmaceutical or social media kind. Thats why there are people who can use drugs “socially” without getting addicted while others get hooked upon first exposure. I would argue the same dynamic occurs with social media. Lucky for me I never got addicted to all the hard drugs I took back in the day but strangely I am now massively addicted to social media. I finally know what addiction feels like and I don’t like it which is why I’m researching ways to control and even eliminate SM from my daily life. Of course my present job as a SW developer for an SM company in the bay is not helping my efforts. Great article and much food for thought…

Love this and love your book!

I was recently reading a Quora answer by Hadley Wickham (who is nerd-famous for writing several R packages). Here’s a snippet of what he said about his creation process:

“Pretty much every package was motivated by some problem that seemed too hard. There’s typically no master plan, just the gradual accretion of evidence that there’s some part of R that people find particularly frustrating. Much of my work is driven by the small scale data analyses that I do, but I’m increasingly turning to twitter, stackoverflow, and reddit as ways of finding common struggles with R.”

This proves what you’ve written in your book: use social media only if it solves a particular problem for you. For Wickham, it is to get a sense of the struggles users have with R so that he can develop packages to solve them. Unlike most of us, Wickham manages to glean insights from social media because he’s specifically looking for something that leads to career growth.

Cal, could you share the reference(s) for the study or studies demonstrating severe (“permanent”) effects of attention fragmentation on focus? As a scientist I am curious about the study design, and results like that can obviously be motivating and applied in other contexts.

The only social media I really follow is Twitter. I don’t know how many of your research projects involve extramural collaborations in CS, but they’re critical in my field (especially because I do theory & computation, so I need to couple with experimentalists). It’s my impression that some important connections outside of conferences take place over Twitter. People discuss papers… usually superficially, but they still discuss them… and new data sets, and stay on one another’s radars during the months between conferences and publications. But I agree that it should be a lower priority than all those things, and it’s not without cost.

I like the suggestion in your book “Deep Work” to stop using social media for 30 days and see what impact it has. I have already tried a variation – I stopped posting. No one appears to have noticed. However I didn’t stop looking at it. I’m not ready to quit 100%, but I’m now limiting all social media to Sundays only.

I find it hard to trust this article. The same page asks us to “quit social media” but “get the latest from Study Hacks in you inbox.” Blogs are just another variant of social media. Moreover, what makes a carefully curated and properly used social media account different than a set of blogs you follow? You see posted content from individuals on both, and you can comment on both. You can even interact with people on blogs by replying to their comments.

I do think that there are some serious problems with social media. But let’s not throw out the baby with the bathwater.

This post is slightly off topic, but I am posting here as perhaps you are more likely to pick up a comment on a current post!

I would be really interested in your take on a nature report I picked up today via one of Ramit Sethi’s newsletters. It reports the results of a long running study which suggests that being gifted does provide significant advantages, and that deliberate practice might not enable just anyone to catch up to this level.

https://www.nature.com/news/how-to-raise-a-genius-lessons-from-a-45-year-study-of-super-smart-children-1.20537

I’ve followed your blog for a while now (and bought the books!) and have learnt a great deal from what you have shared about how to explore one’s learning processes with the aim of enhancing them.

Finally got around to watching this as I’ve been doing more deep work lately and not reading my Feedly as often. I was glad you stuck to the attention message and not to some of the points you raise in your book. I don’t think you’re “butt hurt” as the poster a ways up mentioned, but I do think that often, the fact that you haven’t used social media hinders your ability to talk about its drawbacks with any sort of nuance. I bought DW as an audiobook and have listened to it about 3-4 times since August, and I actually have to fast forward through your discussion of Twitter because it’s so painfully obvious you’ve never used it and don’t have any idea how it really works. It results in you setting up strawmen by accident–of course 10,000 one-to-one messages don’t result in NYT bestseller status, but the problem there is mostly in the assumption that Twitter’s primary function is one-to-one short messages. Because you’ve never used it, you can’t effectively engage it in your arguments. I think your arguments still hold, but they come off as bombastic because you can’t actually talk in any detail about the tools you are warning against.

Your arguments about attention, and on the craftsman approach to tool selection are so much stronger. I, for one, would’ve loved for you to go more in depth about selecting the handful of criteria for selecting tools. That’d be a neat post to read someday. Interestingly, I bought as my next audiobook THE FOUR DISCIPLINES OF EXECUTION and think the level of detail they went into on choosing WIGs and lead measures is exactly the depth that was missing from your craftsman approach to social media discussion.

Thanks. This is a very interesting talk. I will do this as an experiment for 3 months first.

I wonder if there is a sweet spot between “no social media” and addictive/destructive social media use. I also wonder if this isn’t just another example of the older generation thinking that what the younger generation likes is a waste of time. I learned of Cal Newport’s work because of social media, and have “discovered” many articles, books, and people that I have found useful and interesting thanks to social media. Perhaps developing the self-discipline to use social media no more than 30 minutes a day, and always with a focused purpose, is what is needed.

This article kinda bugged me, so I’ve been thinking about it for a few days. Last night I finally realized why – I was watching a new show on HBO called Insecure. The lead was great so I looked up her Wikipedia to see what she had been in before. Turns out she was a huge YouTube sensation, and that’s how she got the deal with HBO.

OK (and I know I’m not the only person to say this already) the idea that you CAN’T create success and achieve meaningful things by leveraging social media is just flat-out WRONG. Case in point with Issa Rae, but that’s just one example. As someone else pointed out, all you have to do is look at how much some of these “social media celebrities” are earning and the sheer number of people they are reaching.

This whole argument of “no social media ever” seems to be throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

I also think it’s especially important for minorities and people of color to have these platforms. It seems elitist and classist to simply mark all social media as “bad.”

I am reading through Geek Heresy at your recommendation (totally amazing book), and one of his major points is that:

Talent does NOT rise above opportunity.

You have to have the talent AND the opportunity. Eliminating something that levels the playing field in a huge way for someone like a talented black actress to be able to get her own TV show on HBO is a HUGE DEAL.

I agree with so much of what you write and say. But as someone who is still struggling to find the right balance between leveraging opportunities from the Internet and still creating deep and meaningful work… this post was sort of worthless.

I don’t think that in the year 2016, quitting social media is this black and white.

• Pingback: Cal Newport on Measuring the Value of Connectivity | Letters by Soo

Honestly, I don’t think you can make much of an argument when someone says “I need social media to contact people” because that’s the way communication is now.

Most people are readily available on FB Messenger, Whatsapp and other messaging platforms. There’s just no other way to contact people efficiently, even as annoying as social media might be with all those unwanted notifications.

I hoped to see Cal address my concern, because according to the Pew research center 67% people use social media for communication. Unfortunately, I don’t think Cal had a good counter-argument which is why he chose to focus on the more distracting side of social media.

• Pingback: Social Media is Changing Your Brain

I really love the two women at 9:30 into the lecture scanning their dumb-phones for the latest in social media 🙂

Wat joke can I use about social media making us more social

• Pingback: Publish more by writing less: How to repurpose your writing and expand the reach of your research - Nick Blackbourn
• Pingback: Simplifying/Deleteing Social Media - rob larue
• Pingback: The Psychology of Procrastination – The Geography Study School
• Pingback: 13 Secrets of Personal Branding from #SaltBae and Chicken Connoisseur
• Pingback: How to clear out the digital clutter and get your focus back | RescueTime Blog
• Pingback: How to Cut Back on Digital Clutter and Regain Your Focus | newstrending
• Pingback: How to Cut Back on Digital Clutter and Regain Your Focus - Lifehacker Guru
• Pingback: How to Cut Back on Digital Clutter and Regain Your Focus – Lifehacker | You Buy Computers
• Pingback: How to Cut Back on Digital Clutter and Regain Your Focus | Intelligent Jamaica
• Pingback: How to Cut Back on Digital Clutter and Regain Your Focus | Jamaican Moments™
• Pingback: How to Cut Back on Digital Clutter and Regain Your Focus – Lifehacker | Best electronic online
• Pingback: Overcoming blogging anxiety | UWE Gradschool blog
• Pingback: The Wider World | Elizabeth Fram
• Pingback: Quit Social Media - TEDx Talk by Dr. Cal Newport
• Pingback: Is technology making us more or less productive? - Olivitek
• Pingback: Book Crunch: "Deep Work: Rules for Focussed Success in a Distracted World", Cal Newport - Why What How
• Pingback: Right to Disengage-A new frontier – Unfreeman

i dont think its a nice idea to quit social media, the reasons whatsoever

• Pingback: Friday Five: final post edition (with a look back at some favorites) – Higher Ed Marketing
• Pingback: Quit Social Media – Study Hacks – Cal Newport – Take A Breath

I really want to quit social media, but I feel sort of obligated to use it because I have kids and I feel like my extended family/etc would hate me if I don’t post pictures of the kids for them to see. If it weren’t for that I would’ve deleted my Facebook a long time ago.

• Pingback: Improve your h-index with these 10 practical strategies
• Pingback: Improve your h-index with these 10 practical strategies - Brachah Kathrin Viehrig
• Pingback: Good Study Routines and Habits – The Curiosity Concept

Leave a Comment Cancel reply

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

Right-wing media push old debunked smear of Walz’s military record despite his 24 years of service

National Guards members who served with Walz praised him and supported his decision to retire to run for Congress, where he helped veterans

Written by Jack Winstanley & Zachary Pleat

Research contributions from Payton Armstrong

Published 08/07/24 6:07 PM EDT

Right-wing media are reviving old smears pushed by political rivals of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz about his retirement from the military, accusing him of “stolen valor” and misleading their audience about the reality of his 24-year service record with the National Guard. Specifically, right-wing media are claiming that Walz resigned and “abandoned” his National Guard unit and resigned after the unit received deployment orders to go to Iraq when in reality , Walz resigned two months before the unit received orders, and Walz likely submitted his retirement papers even earlier.

According to a copy of his service record obtained by Military.com, Walz enlisted in the Army National Guard in 1981 and reached the rank of command sergeant major before retiring in 2005, following a reenlistment after the September 11, 2001, terror attacks. Walz retired honorably as a master sergeant — a lower rank than command sergeant major — since he did not complete all of the necessary coursework for the higher rank before his service ended. Walz went on to successfully campaign for Congress, where he served for multiple terms, helping veterans exposed to toxins during their military service, sponsoring a veterans suicide prevention bill, and advocating for more GI Bill benefits.

During Walz’s 2018 gubernatorial campaign, retired Command Sgts. Maj. Thomas Behrends and Paul Herr wrote a “paid endorsement letter” just days before the election accusing Walz of “abandon[ing]” his unit in order to run for Congress. Specifically, they claimed that he retired in mid-2005 to dodge a unit deployment to Iraq the following year. This smear was repeated by Walz’s gubernatorial opponent in October 2022. 

GOP vice presidential nominee JD Vance, who wrote that he “was lucky to escape any real fighting” during his four-year stint in the Marine Corps, joined in on this smear today during a campaign event in Michigan. Vance said Walz “dropped out of the Army and allowed his unit to go without him.” Vance added: “I think it's shameful to prepare your unit to go to Iraq, to make a promise that you're going to follow through, and then to drop out right before you actually have to go.” Later, Vance said Walz “abandon[ed his] unit right before they went to Iraq.”

CNN correspondent Tom Foreman later debunked this smear after Vance repeated it. On CNN News Central , Foreman explained that Walz retired from his National Guard unit two months before it received orders to deploy to Iraq.

Citation From the August 7, 2024, edition of CNN's  CNN News Central

TOM FOREMAN (CNN CORRESPONDENT): Let's start with the initial claim there, the notion that somehow what Tim Walz did was dodge going into service. He was in the Guard for 24 years. JD Vance was in the Marines for four years. Yes. While he was in there, he filed papers to run for Congress in February of 2005. He retired from his Guard unit that May. The orders to deploy did not come until two months after that.

So the claim that he was somehow dodging going over here after 24 years of service … there’s just no evidence to back that up right now.

Additionally, one guardsman who served under Walz recalled an open discussion within the unit around his congressional campaign during a deployment roughly a year prior to his eventual retirement — further shattering the notion that Walz “quit" and left his unit “hanging” in an attempt to dodge a second deployment. The guardsman said Walz “talked with us for quite a while on that subject. He weighed that decision to run for Congress very heavy. He loved the military, he loved the guard, he loved the soldiers he worked with.” The guardsman additionally told Minnesota Public Radio that Walz used his position as a member of Congress to help struggling National Guard members.

Another guardsman who served with Walz has said that Walz “did nothing wrong with when he chose to leave the service” and stated that he was “a great soldier.” That same guardsman said that Behrends' smears “are ill-informed and possibly sour grapes by a soldier who was passed over for the promotion to command sergeant major that went to Walz.” The Star Tribune reported that Behrends was standing with Walz’s 2022 gubernatorial opponent as he repeated the smears about Walz’s service.

Despite the reality of Walz’s service and the context around his retirement, right-wing media figures have cited the six-years-old “paid endorsement letter” to revive the allegations that he “lied about his military record” and committed “ stolen valor .”

• Radio host Erick Erickson gave up the game when he posted the “paid letter” and wrote: “Looks like it is time to bring back Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.” The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth was a GOP political organization formed in 2004 to smear Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry with lies about his military service record. The man behind that campaign, Chris LaCivita, now works for the Trump campaign. [Twitter/X, 8/6/24 ; FactCheck.org, 8/22/04 ; Mother Jones, June 2024 ]
• The New York Post interviewed Behrends to push his smears against Walz. In an article headlined, “Tim Walz a ‘coward’ and ‘traitor’ for retiring from military before Iraq, says Guardsman who replaced VP pick,” the Post interviewed Behrends about his past paid endorsement of Walz’s gubernatorial rival. In the article, Behrends repeatedly attacked Walz and accused him of “stolen valor” for noting that he had been promoted to command sergeant major before retirement. [New York Post, 8/6/24 ]
• Daily Wire co-founder Ben Shapiro quoted the Post interview to claim Walz “dropped out specifically to avoid going to Iraq.” [The Daily Wire, The Ben Shapiro Show , 8/7/24 ]
• The Daily Wire wrote an article about the “paid letter” under the headline, “Walz ‘Embellished And Selectively Omitted Facts’ About His Military Career: Retired National Guardsmen.” [The Daily Wire, 8/6/24 ]
• Newsmax host Chris Plante displayed the “paid letter” on-screen as he used it to attack Walz’s military service. [Newsmax, Chris Plante The Right Squad , 8/6/24 ]
• Turning Point USA co-founder Charlie Kirk posted the “paid letter” and suggested “Walz lied about his military record.” [Twitter/X, 8/6/24 ]
• Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton also posted the “paid letter” and quoted from it to question Walz’s military record. [Twitter/X, 8/6/24 ]
• Far-right social media troll Jack Posobiec falsely presented the 2018 “paid letter” as “BREAKING” news coverage. [Twitter/X, 8/6/24 ]
• Conservative CNN contributor David Urban posted the “paid letter” and wrote: “I urge the ‘media’ to investigate the letter (below) written by retired Command Sergeants Major of the Minnesota National Guard re: @GovTimWalz military service.” Urban added, “#TheTruthIsOutThere.” [Twitter/X, 8/6/24 ]

trending now in US News

Ryan Seacrest's ex seriously injured after swallowing shards of...

Out-of-control NYC pedicab drivers terrorize tourists, locals --...

Fed-up customers reveal why Starbucks is no longer the king of...

Delta flight attendant hit passenger multiple times with 'loaded'...

Recent college grad shot dead in Taco Bell drive-thru by stranger...

Chilling video shows woman walking home with boyfriend just...

Top-earning FDNY deputy commish who was raking in more than $500K...

'Most wanted' murder suspect on the run for 20 years found...

Tim walz left national guard battalion ‘hanging,’ ‘slithered out the door’ before iraq deployment: vets.

Veterans have accused Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz of “embellishing” his military career and abandoning his National Guard battalion, highlighting that the now-vice presidential pick for the Democrats never served in combat and retired from service ahead of his unit’s 2005 deployment to Iraq.

In a letter posted to Facebook in 2018 as he first ran for governor, retired Command Sergeants Major Thomas Behrends and Paul Herr said Walz retired from his 24-year tenure in the National Guard after learning that his battalion would be deployed to Iraq, despite allegedly assuring his fellow troops he would join them.

“On May 16th, 2005, [Walz] quit, betraying his country, leaving the 1-125th Field Artillery Battalion and its Soldiers hanging; without its senior Non-Commissioned Officer, as the battalion prepared for war,” Behrends and Herr wrote.

Walz, 60, wrapped his military career just in time for him to launch his political career the following year, successfully running for Congress in 2006.

Follow The Post’s coverage on Kamala Harris’ running mate Tim Walz:

• Kamala Harris chooses Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as running mate
• Who is Tim Walz, Kamala Harris’ VP pick?
• Tim Walz signed laws catering to illegal migrants, giving them free health care, tuition
• Trump team says it’s relieved Kamala Harris chose ‘extremist’ Tim Walz: ‘An easy opponent’
• Editorial: Kamala Harris bows to the radicals by picking lefty Tim Walz as her running mate

Behrends and Herr criticized him for leaving the National Guard for Congress despite being fully aware that he could have requested permission from the Pentagon to seek office while on active duty.

Walz further dodged the necessary paperwork to ensure a smooth transition out of military service and “instead … slithered out the door,” the pair added, with his retirement filing showing “soldier not available for signature.”

The National Guard members also accused the now-two-term Minnesota governor of having “embellished and selectively omitted facts of his military career for years.”

The letter was  first unearthed by the Daily Wire .

Still, Walz has said he has “an honorable record” — and other service members who led the same battalion have defended him.

“He was a great soldier,” Joseph Eustice, who served 32 years in the National Guard,  told the Star Tribune  in 2022.

“When he chose to leave, he had every right to leave,” added Eustice, who indicated that other attacks on Walz’s record may have been made by disgruntled soldiers who were passed up for promotions.

Another National Guard member who served under Walz said that the future US lawmaker was eyeing a run for Congress earlier than 2005.

“Would the soldier look down on him because he didn’t go with us? Would the common soldier say, ‘Hey, he didn’t go with us, he’s trying to skip out on a deployment?’ And he wasn’t,” Al Bonnifield recalled to Minnesota Public Radio of Walz’s concerns about dipping out before the deployment to Iraq.

“He talked with us for quite a while on that subject. He weighed that decision to run for Congress very heavy [sic],” Bonnifeld added. “He loved the military, he loved the guard, he loved the soldiers he worked with.”

“We all do what we can. I’m proud I did 24 years,” Walz has said about his service.

Walz joined the National Guard after high school and had served in the 1st Battalion, 125th Field Artillery before his retirement, where he obtained the rank of command sergeant major.

During his subsequent tenure in Congress, Walz came out in opposition against then-President George W. Bush’s plans to increase troop levels in Iraq.

Advertisement