These past few weeks we have been reading about social media and how over the past two decades or so these different platforms have taken over and changed the way we as a society do and view things. In a large overarching lesson, social media has changed the way we view people, relationships, social events, art and even natural disasters. But the biggest thing I think social media has changed and made extremely different is how we view and show the death of a loved one.
This past week my grandmother passed away and so I began to think, how should I tell the people around me she’s gone or should I even tell them at all? Many people that I am surrounded by at school and most of my followers on social media never knew who she was, so why should they get to know she’s gone or why would they even care? Yet so many people we follow feel the need to post extremely long messages with multiple photos talking about the family member or friend that recently passed away. Then as you scroll through your timeline you look at all the comments of people just sending hearts and “praying for you”, and the always so popular “sorry for your loss”, but I kept thinking is that really all that meaningful and do the people who leave those comments actually mean them?
So I did some research and found a bunch of studies that talk about dealing with loss and social media. One article that stuck out the most to me was “The Psychological Effects of Grieving on Social Media”. In this article they discuss a lot of the positives it can do and how it helps make people feel closer together during a time of deep sadness, but in the second half of the article it displayed all the negatives of posting online and I couldn’t agree more with many of their points. “Paradoxically, if social media can bring people together after a death, it can also create heightened feelings of isolation, alienation, and anger in some individuals. “Some of the people I interviewed were angered by people who acted closer to the deceased than they originally were” (Surugue). An example of this is when young Disney actor Cameron Boyce died earlier this summer and everyone was posting and mourning his loss as if they actually knew him. When in reality you knew the characters he played on TV, not him.
But what I began to realize the more and more I thought about it, was that the feeling is the same with the productivity of social media. Everything online and on these social platforms is instantaneous. When you ask questions you get an answer in seconds. “If you work in an environment where you can get an answer to a question or a specific piece of information immediately when the need arises, this makes your life easier – at least, in the moment” (Newport 58). This is the same when you post about a tragedy or a death, you get an instantaneous response from people reassuring you that you’ll be okay and they’re all validating your feelings of sadness and sorrow. “What you do is you make it so when someone pulls a lever, sometimes they get a reward, an exciting reward” (Cooper 2). The reward here is validation and reassurance.
Once I made this discovery, I continued thinking and realized that was how it all related to deep work. Due to this instant work environment and the constant need to be connected and have everything given to you within seconds, deep work becomes virtually impossible. Thanks to the brain hijacking of social media, we all want instant gratification. So sitting down, getting no help from outside sources, and having to do this over and over again, over a long period of time and getting nothing back in return, is completely against everything social media has programmed us to be used to. “Technology is contributing toward so-called “continuous partial attention”, severely limiting people’s ability to focus, and possibly lowering IQ. One recent study showed that the mere presence of smartphones damages cognitive capacity – even when the device is turned off. “Everyone is distracted,” Rosenstein says. “All of the time” (Lewis 2).
Clearly, most people with any sense can see that social media and the constant sharing of all of our information and constant use of our different devices can’t be good, but we don’t stop. And I feel that’s because most of us can’t. Technology and social media is our entire lives, we can’t just completely write it off and become a recluse. So the real question is, how do we find the balance? I’m going to keep looking into that on this blog as continue into this semester. But for starters, I think we can all stop posting each time someone in our lives passes away.
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