THE SOCIAL ADVANTAGE

Concerns about young people’s excessive use of social media are nothing new. But, for many, the alarm was sounded most urgently with the release of Jeff Orlowski’s docudrama The Social Dilemma, which reached Netflix last September. Marshalling an impressive roster of former engineers and executives from companies such as Facebook and Google, the film puts forward a compelling case against our compulsive posting and scrolling.

You might have heard the phrase: “If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product”. In other words, advertisers are the clients, and your attention is what is being sold to them – and the more of it they can claim, the better. In The Social Dilemma, Silicon Valley computer scientist Jaron Lanier takes this sentiment one step further: “It’s the gradual, slight, imperceptible change in your own behaviour and perception that is the product... changing what you do, how you think, who you are”.

There can be no doubt that social media has changed the way we think and behave. But what is equally true is that Lanier’s appeal for us to delete our social media accounts is unrealistic. The discussion around social media too often presupposes that it is something that can be ignored – as if the experiences that young people are having online were unimportant. So, here’s a different question: can changing the way we use it influence our behaviour for the better?

ONLY CONNECT

“I was 26 when my mum died,” Rachel Wilson tells me over Zoom. Wilson, now 28, is a writer and the founder of the Grief Network (@griefnetwork), an Instagram