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Saying 2020 wasn't a great year would be the understatement of the year. It was a shit show! At the time of this writing, since November 2019 there have been more than 81 million confirmed cases of Coronavirus, a SARS outbreak which has claimed at least 1.77 million lives. The country went into lockdown on the 23rd March, with Prime Minister Boris Johnson urging the nation that we "must stay at home." Those that could were told to work from home until further notice, whilst others were furloughed or lost their jobs entirely. Schools, colleges and universities across the country closed and adopted distance learning practices. Public transport was reduced to a skeleton service to support the transport of key workers only - the same key workers that had been dubbed "low skilled" workers just weeks beforehand. Our NHS, emergency and rail services and food supply chain staff, amongst many others, continued to work through the height of the crisis to keep the country running. Unemployment in the UK rose to a record high, caused mainly by job losses in the retail and hospitality sectors. Panic-buying saw row-upon-row of supermarket shelves left barren, leaving off-peak shoppers unable to fill their baskets. Government spending surged, with the country expected to borrow the most amount of money in a single financial year since World War Two, all in a bid to contain the virus and to provide a truly unprecedented package of support to those whose income has been lost or significantly reduced due to the pandemic. Stock markets plummeted and the Bank of England dropped the interest rate to help encourage consumer spending and to postpone economic downturn. Although the country will soon face the inevitable consequences of yet another recession. This year, we have all felt the floor shift in some way - be it a mild tremor or devastating earthquake.

It's been the scariest, most trying and uncertain time in my adult life. But as thankful as I am to finally be talking about the year 2020 in the past tense, there were but a few diamonds in the mud. One silver-lining was the come to Jesus moment that brought me more clarity than I've had in years, the clarity that helped me to see social media for what it truly is - not at all social.

Social media lost it's all-important adjective many years ago, yet none of us noticed. Something that started out as a tool for good has become a weapon, a means of bombarding the general public like never before. According to Tristan Harris, former Design Ethicist at Google, "two billion people will have thoughts they didn't intend to have because a designer at Google said, 'This is how notifications work on that screen you wake up to every morning.'" Social media is built deliberately addictive. Harris goes on to explain that "If you are not paying for the product, then you are the product." To understand what he means by that, you simply need to follow the money. Roger McNamee, an investor in the tech industry for the past 35 years, explains that for "the first fifty years of Silicon Valley, the industry made products... and sold them to customers, [which is a] nice, simple business model." However the last few years as seen a shift in the industry. He says "For the last 10 years, the biggest companies in Silicon Valley have been in the business of selling their users." Or as Aza Raskin, former Creative Lead for Firefox, puts it, "because we don't pay for the products we use, advertisers pay for the products we use... advertisers are the customers [and] we are the things being sold." But what is it they are buying? Surely they can't be buying our data - that would be illegal? Well what they are actually doing is competing for our attention. They want to maximise user engagement, encouraging us to spend as much time scrolling and clicking and liking as they possibly can. Since the advertisers are the customers, they are paying to keep the platforms up and, in exchange, the social media platforms show their ads to us. And that's best-case scenario. According to Jaron Lanier, Computer Scientist and Founding Father of Virtual Reality, "that's a little too simplistic." He goes on to say that the social media giants are in the business of selling "the gradual, slight, imperseptable change in [our] behaviour and perception." 

I had to pause Netflix and make a coffee when I first heard that. I initially rejected the notion, thinking that was all just crazy talk. But is it?

And then I thought about it, gesticulating at my phone when I realised he is right - I've been a victim of this very thing! Scrolling through Instagram one minute, buying clothes from Gymshark the next! Social media, riddled with advertisements by those who pay the proverbial rent, influences every decision we make. We willingly invite the engines of direct marketing into our lives without question, completely reliant on and yet oblivious to them. We are living in the Matrix. 

It's not just the advertising that's problematic. Social media is the go-to news platform, before the News at 10 and way before the morning papers. You can get news from anywhere around the world straight to your Twitter feed - and it doesn't even need to be true! Plus it upsets the very fabric of democratic society. In the states, social media was used to influence the presidential election result.

I slurped some coffee and pondered, Netflix still paused in the background. I figured I no longer wanted to play this charade, this game of football where I experience the game from inside the ball. Being kicked from pillar to post, helping multi-millionaire's in Silicon Valley achieve their goals without ever furthering my own. The reality is that if enough people were to suddenly decide they have had enough of being a pawn, we can, as a society, kick over the chess board. But I was practically born into a technology-driven world, so I needed a starting block.

I had already been trying to change other aspects of my life, trying to find ways to declutter and control stress. But I was still neck-deep in social media, still swirling around an addictive digital world of temptation. I soon realised that training myself to better cope with stress wasn't quite cutting it for me. So with everything I had been drip-fed about social media, it became clear to me that the next step was to start being very deliberate about the media I absorb. After all, it's better to prevent stress in the first place than to simply get better at coping with it - at least where possible. And so this summer, my social media hiatus began, starting with Twitter, Snapchat, Pinterest and LinkedIn. 

Twitter, the first to go, is the platform that encourages short, pithy, clever-dick remarks. I used to pride myself on thinking up smart phrases and comments to send into the ether for no reason other than to get a laugh or some passive likes. But it's more dangerous than it looks. It gives place for stray thoughts to become public. Thoughts which often are not fully-formed, lack any real research or are simply, factually incorrect. If you're in any doubt about that, check out Donald Trump's feed! Naturally, with Twitter being so available, it also gives place for any such thought to be publicly torn to shreds by anyone with a differing opinion, one which may be equally inaccurate or ill-researched. Often it's not about who is right, it's about who shouts the loudest. I've fallen victim to this a few times over the years. I'm not one to throw shit out into the world without thinking it through or fact checking, but what you can't account for is other people's experiences. That's not to say that I didn't deserve the several tearing-downs I've had on the platform over the years - in fact I very much did! But there comes a time in your life when you no longer want to be known for the same mannerisms you were renowned for in your childhood. I had started looking at what Vanessa Vallely calls my "personal brand," specifically the footprint I leave behind online. Every status update, re-post and tweet you put out there is a mark on the canvas which people will inevitably use to judge my character as a whole. Of course the reality is that most people in the world don't and never will know me personally and since they have nothing else to go on, they can see the picture in part - but not in full. Whilst I can't control whether or not people will like the full picture, I can at least make sure that it's there to see. So I suspended my account, deleted the 280-character opinion machine from my phone and started a blog.

Pinterest was next-up and it's a tricky one. You think it is this app that will turn you into a designer. You think that your home will suddenly be all put-together and modern and adult-like. But really, all it did was encourage the very consumerism I've been trying to escape. I'd spend ages swiping through picture after picture of landscaped gardens, fitted island-kitchens and rooms filled with designer furniture. If the American Dream could be condensed down into an app, ladies and gentlemen you already have it. So for that reason, it was out.

There's a lot I could say about Snapchat, none of which I really want to think about if truth be told. Sure, there are the occasional group chat messages and funny videos from friends that I miss out on, but there came a time when the good was no longer out-weighing the bad. The bottom-line really was I felt I had out-grown the platform and so it was next to be deleted.

Then there was LinkedIn, which is slightly different. It can genuinely be useful both in a professional and personal sense. I've seen people help their friends get jobs using LinkedIn comments and tagging as a medium. But it's like being friends with Ray Mears. Handy that he's there but you don't need to go everywhere with him. So while I deleted the app from my phone, my profile still exists. I'll periodically grab my laptop and dip in and out to see what's happening, share any big news and update my profile, but that's as sexy as it gets. 

I sat back in my seat, a dribble of cold coffee still lingering at the bottom of my mug and breathed deeply out. I could have given myself a pat on the back. I really was chuffed. A social media purge had been long over-due but continually pushed back. I feel it's really important to control your own bandwidth, else you can quite easily loose entire days staring at a glowing screen. I later did the same with Facebook and Instagram as I did with LinkedIn. I get value from the apps but only when I consume them deliberately. I no longer wish to loose hours of my day passively scrolling through 'news' feeds, but if I want to upload a photo I like then I still can. Social media, like any media, isn't in itself the problem after all, it's how it is used, or misused, that we must be conscious of.

~ Aedan.