Am I addicted to my smartphone and social media? The short answer is yeah, kinda. Social media and my phone is something that I will always have with me. I wake up and I check my phone and Snapchat. I eat food and watch YouTube and scroll through TikTok. Before I hop in the shower, I check my phone and organize my Fantasy Football lineup and I lull myself to sleep to the glorious ending theme of Survivor on Netflix, having dreams of being on the show. My phone is a connection of me and I know many of my peers can relate to this. I have no reason to lie, I would rather be on my phone distracted than being productive and getting all of my homework done. This is common for me. It is easy to watch one YouTube video and claim you’re taking a break from your work and before you know it, I am watching every clip of every British game show panel until I have rewatched them a dozen times.
My phone helps me out a lot. I use it to check my email while I am doing homework and I typically use it as another screen to look at directions for how to do my work. I also use my phone to stay connected to the important people in my life such as my lovely mother, grandmother and my girlfriend. I use my phone to listen to music to help myself relax and I use social media to let out a little bit of steam or have a little fun. Sometimes, social media and phone usage is too much of a good thing. Social media can consume a lot of my valuable time. Sometimes when I am online and see my friends doing things without me, I develop a little bit of FOMO (fear of missing out) and sadness. Lastly, given the unprecedented times of this COVID-19 pandemic and the strong division of the nation in politics, I start to become frustrated with the cruelness of society and repetitive nature of sharing on social media. My usage of social media has change drastically over the course of the last couple years, but that does not necessarily mean I am on social media any less, I just find it hard to find what I want to share with people.
My last Instagram post was August 9th and accumulated 60 likes. This made me feel not great because it was a smaller number of likes than I usually get. However, in recent years I have weened away sharing posts on certain social medias, Instagram being one of them. I feel kind of sad that I don’t really have anything exciting to share but I a often remind myself that 2020 is a difficult and challenging year for all of us. My likes really don’t matter to me much anymore. On October 2nd, I posted on Facebook a status that I thought was motivational and inspiring. It received 10 reactions. I use Facebook very little and I am not very surprised it did not reach a large audience. I just thought that somebody, including myself needed to hear some words of encouragement. It didn’t get any comments. On September 28th, I posted my fourth installment of my goofy TikTok series “Reading Signs My Mom Has In The House”. I deleted it a couple weeks ago and it only got six likes. I haven’t really built any kind of following on TikTok nor do I want to. My TikTok posts have no real intention behind them other than to make myself and my Mom laugh. If other people get enjoyment out of it (which some do), it’s a small bonus. My other TikTok posts are enjoyed by some of my close friends and those people are the only ones I really care about viewing them.
Attached below this blog is my screen time findings on my iPhone. I am not very surprised by this data as screen usage is something I have become very mindful of, especially this year. This year, I started to monitor my screen time as it was recommended to me and I just got the new iPhone and this data is very easily accessible. I do think that I spend too much time on my phone. I think I have gotten a little lazy during quarantine but again, even though I am on my phone most of the day, I am productive. I believe that as long as you are truly mindful of technology and how much you use, you are okay to continue using screens. If you want to cut down an hour or two by doing something outside, do so. I probably will. If I sit too long at a screen my eyes start to hurt and I have become much more headache prone than I once was. There were many things that I realized when recording my data below. Firstly, I no longer use text message. I only text my parents or my grandmother. My main method of communication is Snapchat, which is a social media app. I was not surprised to find YouTube as one of top most frequently visited apps. I study using YouTube, I watch TV using YouTube and I watch vlogs. Everything is on YouTube so I watch a lot of it. I just recently downloaded the new game that everyone was talking about to see what the hype was about, Among Us. I was slightly surprised that I have already clocked in a couple hours even though it felt like I was only playing a couple short games a night. The social media use doesn’t shock me either. I mindlessly scroll sometimes. In summation, I will be slightly cutting back on how much I use social media. Do I think I do too much? A little, yeah. However, I am not addicted. Not yet.
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