I recently watched the documentary ‘The Social Dilemma’ on Netflix, and it was an eye opener on how using the internet and especially social media consumes our lives and makes us addicted to these platforms. It made me introspect and look at how much time I was spending online, in front of a screen.
Why do we spend a lot more time on the internet these days compared to just the last decade? Well, the primary reasons have been the advent of the smartphone and the proliferation of high speed mobile internet, not to mention the lower cost of entry into the digital sphere.
I can remember a time, just 10 years ago, when cyber cafes were the only means of accessing the internet if you did not own a computer with a broadband connection at home. If you did have a computer or laptop at home, it was most likely to be shared as well, so your total usage time would at most be a couple of hours each day.
Smartphones were still a new concept, with the first Apple iPhone being launched in 2007. You still had to get your movies on DVDs, Youtube was in its infancy, and mobile gaming involved playing Snake on your Nokia phone. As for social media, you had Orkut and MySpace. Facebook was not yet a household name.
It was in 2014 that the Chinese smartphone manufacturer Xiaomi first launched in India. It was a real game-changer with its prices which were far more accessible to the masses. I still remember in those days, buying a good smartphone from a reputed manufacturer like Samsung or Nokia would cost around Rs. 20,000/-. Xiaomi’s phone would have similar or better specifications for half the price, and the Rs. 10,000/- price remains a sweet spot even today for customers. Now it wasn’t just the rich or upper middle class who owned a smartphone. Everyone, from the auto driver to the maid had a smartphone. In fact, I found it rather amusing that many of them owned a better smartphone than me.
But smartphones are quite useless without a good mobile internet connection. Basically, phones have evolved from devices for making calls to do-it-all computing devices to access the internet. Mobile Internet in India is also among the cheapest in the world, with Reliance’s Jio sending shockwaves in the industry by undercutting its rivals when it launched in 2016, just as Xiaomi had done in the smartphone space. To give you an idea of how affordable it is nowadays, a one month prepaid plan on Jio which gives you 2GB of mobile data per day, together with unlimited calls costs Rs. 249/-, or less than $3.50/- per month.
These factors, combined with the growth of app based services like Uber (Cabs), Swiggy (Food Delivery), Netflix (Movie Streaming), Paytm (Mobile Payment Gateway) etc. made us more and more reliant on our phones for doing everything in today’s connected world.
Which brings us to Social Media. More than any of the above, Social Media has been the service that has benefited the most from the proliferation of smartphones and mobile internet. So what is social media? According to the oxford dictionary, it is the websites and applications that enable users to create and share content or to participate in social networking. The most well known social media platforms today are facebook, whatsapp, instagram, reddit, twitter, youtube, snapchat, telegram and linkedin.
Which brings us to the crux of this article; How we are addicted to our smartphones in general and social media in particular. Notice the first thing that many of us do when we wake up in the morning? Yes, it is to pick up our phones from the bedside table and look at all the notifications that had come during the night. We check our whatsapp, gmail and the news app for the latest scoops. We then opened facebook and wished our friend a happy birthday after facebook reminded us about it.
We then put on youtube and see what our favorite content creators have uploaded, and play those videos while getting ready for work and cooking breakfast. If we are not driving, we browse reddit on the bus, train or cab, while listening to our favorite tunes on the radio or spotify. Getting to work makes us take a pause, but when there is some downtime we see the links or videos our colleagues have shared on whatsapp, getting a small chuckle or groaning that we wasted our time. We then get home, watching our phones since it takes us away from being stuck in evening traffic. Getting home, we spend some time with our family before we put on something on netflix during dinner. If the movie is boring we probably pick up our phones again, chatting with our friends or checking our facebook feed. When we get to bed we are still checking our phones, delaying our sleep by a few minutes if there is a particular notification that we need to definitely click on and check out.
We wake up the next morning and the cycle repeats itself.
If this does sound even a bit familiar you need to be concerned. We often talk about addictions to harmful substances like drugs, alcohol, cigarettes or junk food, but what we fail to realize is that we are all addicted to some degree to the drug of social media and the internet.
How many of us can sit still these days without our phones, doing nothing? Just try it. I guarantee you’ll find it difficult. We are dependent these days on getting notifications, on the constant stimulation of checking out new pictures, videos, messages and other forms of entertainment.
And the social media companies know this. Their platforms are designed to hook you in and keep stimulating you with new content. That is why infinite scrolling on phones is very addictive. You keep scrolling down and down, hoping to find something new, something interesting. When you do, your brain gets a hit of dopamine, the reward chemical. This pursues you into scrolling even further, trying to find the next interesting article, picture or video. You crave the dopamine hit, and you become addicted to receiving it.
That is why a lot of us have smartphone anxiety, when we are pried away from the grip of our phones, when we lose mobile connectivity, when our batteries are running low. We cannot imagine being without our constant stimulation, we do not want to lose out on any new messages from our friends, to the next interesting piece of content.
So, what can we do about this? Well, I hope I have been able to convince you that this is a problem. Realising that this is a problem is the beginning of a way to the solution, and that you are willing to take steps to reducing your dependency on social media and the internet. If after reading the above you feel it does not apply to you, congratulations. You are already free from the grip of social media.
If however, you feel that you are even a bit addicted the following steps below will help:
Knowing how much you are using your phone each day
The first step in reducing your dependency is to know the extent of the problem. Since most people have Android smartphones, the steps below will apply primarily to them.
If you have a phone which has been manufactured in 2018 or later, you would have an app called ‘Digital Wellbeing’ installed.
To find the app, go to Settings and scroll down till you find it
Open the app
You will see on the top the total time you have used your smartphone for every day
Click on the total time and it will take you to the dashboard screen, where it shows how much time you used each app on a day-to-day basis, in descending order
Setting a Limit on how long you can use a particular app
After knowing which apps you wish to reduce time spent, you can place a limit via the Digital Wellbeing app to ensure you don’t spend a minute more than necessary on the apps in question.
Click on the app whose time you wish to reduce. Here I have clicked on Reddit, since it consumes the most time
The next screen shows the time spent. In the middle of the screen is a button called ‘App Timer’
Click on it. You can then select for how long the app will be available to you each day. You can either select 15 mins, 30 minutes, one hour or a custom time whereby you can choose any period of time you like (e.g. 17 minutes, 2 hours etc)
After you have used the app for the set time, it will lock you out, and you cannot access the app until the next day. Keep in mind it keeps giving you reminders when you have 10 minutes, or 5 minutes left, so you are not sudden locked out of your app in the middle of some task
If you wish to still use the app for a few more minutes after you have been locked out, say if you have some task to complete, you will be allowed to select some additional time if you want, in 10 minute intervals.
Apply the above steps to each app whose usage time you wish to limit.
Finding something else to do
So, congratulations, you have successfully placed limits on how much you can use your phone. But it is not enough to simply reduce your phone usage and do nothing else. We use our phones as a distraction, and when that distraction is no longer available, our mind finds it hard to just exist and be in the moment. You need to find something else to do. That something needs to be an activity that does not involve sitting in front of a screen, so watching television does not count.
To try and experiment with this, I tried quitting using all screen based devices for a day, something that is called a Digital Detox. It was quite hard initially, since a lot of things I did, whether work or entertainment related, relied on a screen. So I first started cleaning the house by sweeping and mopping the floors, then I went out for a walk into the crisp sunny air. Upon coming back, I took some rest and slept for a while, before waking up and reading a book I had been putting off for a few months. I also started journaling and writing down my thoughts, which was very insightful. Some exercise helped kill off another hour, followed by more walking. It was then that the sun set and the day got over.
It wasn’t easy, especially for me. And I am not advocating one cut out phones and computers from one's life, since it is not practical. We depend on our phones for lots of things, and they have definitely made our lives easier. We have to find a balance though, so that it does not consume our life completely.
So what is that balance? How much should I use my phone? I cannot answer that question, for each of us has a different set of requirements. What I would recommend is you look at those apps which are not filling your day with productivity or utility, and place a limit on them. Start off by placing a limit of 50 percent, so you halve your typical usage. With time, you will find that you use these apps and platforms more mindfully, not just mindlessly scrolling all day long. You will get more out of them, and find more time created for yourself every day.
You will not be dependent on that little boss who sits in your pocket or your desk, buzzing away, asking you to pay attention to it every minute of every day.
