Published in El Pais, 12 May 2018.
You are working, having lunch or just relaxing, and suddenly your phone makes a buzzing or beeping sound. You know it means that a message of some source arrived. It can be a, twitter, Facebook, SMS, WhatsApp, email, Instagram, LinkedIn or a text message. How many of us can resist picking up the phone and look at the message? Probably not that many. It is a known problem for many of us. We turned into slaves of the digital revolution!!
Long time ago, like 20 years, the only thing that would interrupt your daily routine would be a cellphone call. And since those calls were rather expensive, you knew that the person calling you wouldn’t start talking about the latest gossip in show business, but would tell what is important and would keep it short and to the point. That changed completely; nowadays, we are constantly overwhelmed with information that before we wouldn’t have missed at all. Before, we would have enjoyed the history of a friend of his last vacations at a birthday party.
And thus, it has been suggested that many people suffer from so called Social Media Stress and that missing any updates of the lives of your social media contacts, causes people to freak out. This sounds to me more as an addiction. Personally, I don’t have too much with social media. To me it is just a nice way to stay in touch with people, but to say that I jump out of chair when my phone beeps, not really. Let’s say, it is a fun way to kill some time when you are waiting in a line.
Some people say it is much less stressful to not be connected. I think they are right, after all 20 years ago, we were barely using email and still we stayed in touch with our friends. I know people with over 1000 friends in Facebook and I wonder if they really stay in contact with all of them and if they are happier with their virtual friendship rather than in the previous social media era.
Maybe offline people are partly responsible for the stress of the online people who have to break their heads on how they are going contact those people from the “stone age”. Anyway, get your life back and at least disable your buzzing notifications when you are with family or friends in front of you!
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