I hit Send on a tweet I’d spent an hour writing, the tweet like a carrier pigeon swooping across the Internet with the story’s link. And between the taping of each block of Around the Horn, I refreshed Twitter. Had anyone finished the piece yet? Did they care enough to respond? As I walked out of the ESPN Times Square building after filming, I kept refreshing, and the following sentence is not much of an exaggeration: I did not stop refreshing Twitter for five months. At night, for hours, I would rotate loading Twitter, then Instagram, Gmail, and iMessage. I stopped reading books because I couldn’t concentrate; I would launch my phone after reading each page. I rarely called people on the phone, but I sent thousands of texts, many with emojis. The point is, even before I lost myself trying to reconstruct Maddy, I had already lost myself to some hollow online version of me. The volume of the response to “Split Image,” as well as the intensity of the messages, felt like a kind of drug. For weeks, every time I refreshed my e-mail or Twitter, I got a hit of dopamine. And so in the months afterward, I continued to feverishly refresh those accounts, hoping for more digital feedback and interaction.
In her book Mind Change, Susan Greenfield asks this relevant question: “What if a cyber airbrushed persona started to elbow out the real you?” It’s easy to imagine your social persona as the most polished version of yourself. In the 1800s, this would be the “you” that showed up at the ball, or the dance, or Christmas Day service: best clothes, best face, ready to charm. And of course there’s nothing radical about presenting edited versions of ourselves, which we’ve always done. We once sent letters by horseback that contained only the words and ideas we wanted relayed. We once commissioned artists to paint our likeness, and these paintings almost certainly incorporated the equivalent of filters, specific instructions to paint the subject in the best possible light, from the best angle—soften the features, please. Self-editing began at the beginning. The only difference now is the volume of one another’s edited lives that we consume.
In December 2016, The New Yorker posted an article by Jia Tolentino, “The Worst Year Ever, Until Next Year.” In it, Tolentino addresses the potential, yet still unknowable, problems created by digital consumption. “There is no limit to the amount of misfortune a person can take in via the Internet,” she writes. “And there’s no easy way to properly calibrate it—no guidebook for how to expand your heart to accommodate these simultaneous scales of human experience; no way to train your heart to separate the banal from the profound. Our ability to change things is not increasing at the same rate as our ability to know about them. No, 2016 is not the worst year ever, but it’s the year I started feeling like the Internet would only ever induce the sense of powerlessness that comes when the sphere of what a person can influence remains static, while the sphere of what can influence us seems to expand without limit, allowing no respite at all.”
Before social media, we mostly interacted with one another in the bright light of day, where we all have so much less control over how we might look or seem. Now we spend hours a day consuming one another online. Moreover, digital natives have known only this reality. They have grown up on Instagram and Snapchat, absorbing hundreds of images a day. And most of these perfect pictures, loaded into boxes, reflect little of each person’s reality. We’re consuming an increasingly filtered world yet walking through our own realities unfiltered.
Maybe this matters less when life is good. Maybe when we’re in a good space, when we’re “happy,” it’s nice to launch social media and see how well everyone else is doing. The whole experience might feel like momentum, all this beauty and goodness gracefully stacking higher and higher. And when you’re in this place, you’re often rational, too, because your mind isn’t in fight-or-flight mode. Your pulse is low. Your thinking is clear. You’re able to recognize how edited so much of it is. But that’s okay, you tell yourself, because life is so good, and beautiful pictures and projected happiness are lovely.
But how often are we in that sane and safe place? And what about the rest of the time, when life is cloudy and gray, and getting out of your head is a struggle? Then what impact does the perfectly manicured landscape of social media have on our brains? A study of more than seven hundred college students by researchers at the University of Missouri found that Facebook could spark feelings of envy, which can lead to symptoms of depression. When you’re anxious and low, and out of habit (and addiction) you launch social media, it is unlikely that images of others will help you feel connected. Rather, they almost certainly further pry apart the space between you and everyone else, because you are not happy and everyone else seems to be.
Social media has psychological side effects. Paradoxically, hyperconnectivity may create feelings of disconnection—not only between us and others, but within ourselves. In Mind Change, clinical psychologist Larry Rosen points out that a “dangerous gap could grow between this idealized ‘front stage’ you and the real ‘backstage’ you, leading to a feeling of disconnection and isolation.” Social media doesn’t represent the first chance we’ve had to “distort” our identity, but it is the first that allows us to do so in such volume, and with such accessibility. Many celebrities have long felt the extreme disconnect between the public and private versions of themselves. Now the lived experience of a fractured persona, and the emotional impact of it, is being felt to varying degrees by millions of us.
This potential “division” within ourselves is compounded by a decrease in our attention spans and depth of thinking. Throughout human history, we have soothed ourselves by creating, by mining our brains and hearts, turning pain into thoughts, thoughts into art. Now we are tethered to a steady hum of the superficial, and it is becoming increasingly difficult to disconnect, to turn inward, away from that buzz. Even our sense of time has shape-shifted, because everything can be accessed instantaneously. It’s not hard to see, when viewed through this lens, that carefully considered responses are being replaced by knee-jerk reactions.
Another addition to this technological whirlwind: texting and emojis. Social media and texting have something specific in common: they both allow you to easily create a version of yourself that is more palatable—to others and to yourself. Texting gives the user ultimate control. A face-to-face conversation, or even a telephone call, might reveal more than someone intends or desires. Like water, verbal communication is hard to contain, easily spilling over. On text, users answer only what they want to answer and can easily end the conversation abruptly if they don’t like where it’s going. Or for any reason at all. In her book Alone Together, Sherry Turkle writes that young people “prefer to deal with strong feelings from the safe haven of the Net. It gives them an alternative to processing emotions in real time.”
Young adults now predominantly communicate through text, or on Instagram and Snapchat. All of us, adults included, call people on the phone less frequently. Text is absolutely an efficient mode of staying in touch, because we can engage with numerous people while working—a steady stream of contact. And again, this may be fine when you’re feeling healthy and happy. But when you’re not, studies show that relying on these modes of digital communication does little to curb feelings of isolation and sadness.