Until Tomorrow… Social Media Post-Pandemic
In early March one of the boughs of the Wanaka Tree was chopped off, vandalising one of the most famous sites in New Zealand. The tree was a famous Instagram location (see #thatwanakatree), but for the people of New Zealand was more than potential for likes: the tree represented endurance and resilience. The butchering of a tree which exists through filters and hashtags indicates the backlash of a society which wants to be disassociated from a millennial honeytrap. But it also raises the idea of something becoming worthless once its marketability and aesthetic are ruined. Of course, the Wanaka tree remains a significant part of New Zealand culture - perhaps even more so given its reformed image of one of resistance. However, the incident seems to question whether the image of the tree was worth more than the tree itself. I think this relationship between image and reality - particularly the way in which the internet enables fantasy to overtake real existence - highlights something interesting about the way we interact with social media. In principle we know that most of content we guzzle is not real. However, this ‘gift’ of reality-manipulation is addictive.
American writer and philosopher Susan Sontag was particularly interested in the ability of the photograph to capture a moment in time. In her collection of essays On Photography (1977) Sontag said ‘there is no final photograph’. Images develop according to their audience while the feelings, thoughts and life they contain create an intertextuality of person and image: of life lived and life captured. If a moment is frozen in time, it is recovered from its mundanity. It is given status: it is a moment which the photographer deems worthy of preservation. Yet the majority of people can take as many photos as they want, and the idea of ‘a moment worth preserving’ is perhaps dulled. In his essay ‘Books vs. Cigarettes’ (1946) George Orwell compared the annual cost of books with the cost of buying cigarettes. He made the case that although books are viewed as a luxury item, they are just as affordable - yet perhaps not as addictive - as cigarettes. Despite the fact that books are viewed as exclusive items, and tobacco the vice of the everyman, their costs were the same. He concluded that books are not as popular because they are generally a more ‘difficult’, taxing form of entertainment than watching T.V., or smoking. I argue that social media will become the new cigarettes. That our obsession with images will grow less feverish. Unlike Orwell, I’m not proving one to be a higher form of entertainment than the other, but by aligning them I argue that they are comparable drugs.
The public use of social networking will be interesting to track over the next few months. Covid-19 has ensured the isolation of many for whom the internet is the only way of quite literally remaining in touch with humanity. With the pandemic, sustaining an online presence is one of the few means of clinging together. However, I wonder if this saturation of social media will make it less appealing when the virus passes. On the internet, people don’t speak: they declaim. Everything is image based. Altered. And after having lived in a world in which we are surviving on less, it may even seem obscene to see people flaunting “more”, a feverish carousel of people who deal only in excess. Celebrities such as Sam Smith and Vanessa Hudgens have already been criticised for their tactlessness, showing a frighteningly ignorant lack of social awareness. Influencers may seem coarse, hedonistic, vulgar, when basic items such as bread and toilet roll are scarce. It will be obscene to see prettylittlething outfits flaunted on the gym-toned bodies of those whose greatest fear is that their Barry’s classes are cancelled. That world already doesn’t seem real. Too much excess. Just too much.
In the World After Corona - that glimmering, nebulous term, like a utopia - having been forced to converse via webcam rather than in bars and restaurants, I predict that the allure of the web will not be as strong. Sight will no longer be filtered through pixels. To see for oneself a mountain, to climb and taste sweat and smell soil and rain and earth and feel alive will be a stronger drug. One of the draws of social media is that it smoothens and magnifies: it is fake, it is an edited reality. But when the online sphere is no longer a heightened version of reality which we enter into by choice, and becomes the only reality available to us, it reflects ourselves back - in the black mirror of the screen. Technophobes and technophiles alike are forced to turn to social media as a way of connecting with loved ones, and I feel this overuse, this abundance will make ‘logging on’ feel strained.
I envisage the decline of social media. It will be used by small groups, flourishing each summer as people still flaunt their new-found ability to travel, but it will die down again. It will be a supplement to rather than a substitute for real life. Simple things like feeling the sun on your face will be the priority rather than feeling the sickening blue glow of screens ache the corners of your eyes. Social media will be ‘done’ in small groups gathering discreetly in the cold, like the smokers of their day. People will make a gesture of a swipe, indicate going outdoors and they will collect, faces illuminated by the glow of apps around the screen. And for those people who don’t use social media, or who are quitting, they will comment and wonder at how the taste of desperation can still be a draw. How can looking at fake bodies be better than touching the real bodies of each other?
We will no longer want to die by our own hand, whether by cigarette or by the opening of an app. Apps will be hidden behind counters, shutters drawn; they will have to be requested without their candy coloured icons being seen. Instagram will have warnings on its packaging: SOCIAL MEDIA KILLS. Images of influencers’ taut bodies will replace the pictures of cancer, looking as abnormal and unnatural, edited as they are, as the decaying body parts on cigarette packaging.
People will proud to tell each other when they’ve quit or cut back. During these conversations past users will think back to a guilty history where they also couldn’t put down the phone, where they also craved the hit of opening an app, feeling the white singing glow of a liked post. The average daily screen time for adults in the UK is 3 hours and 23 minutes. I reckon it is, in fact, much longer. This is especially true if one considers the sedative screens of televisions and billboards across cities.
Smoking and social media are social killers, really causing isolation whilst appearing to promote the opposite. They seem to cause a reduction of proximity by joining people together, but are obdurate at ensuring social isolation as they mutate into addictions. Consider the faces sculpted for social media. Think of the clothes bought from it, the lives designed around it, and then consider the cost of counselling, the cost of life. And social media is all the more insidious because it cannot be seen. Like the virus, it is a silent killer. Except one that comes with a bunny filter.
At the moment the future seems to be cleaner. A world in which people can meet and hug on street corners, rather than swipe a screen in self-isolation. I hope that social media can also be brave enough to log off, even temporarily.
Written by Esther Bancroft
A recent graduate of Bristol university, Esther has returned to the pen to write a little bit about a little bit of everything. When not staring at a screen trying to be creative, she likes to buy books without reading them and paint pictures of the sea - which is her healthy obsession.