Literature Review

Literature Review

What is the first thing you do in the morning? After opening your eyes, you probably roll over and snooze your alarm. I’m assuming you use your smart phone as your alarm clock each morning. Even if not, I’m sure after shutting off that alarm the next thing you do is unlock your phone, see if you missed any texts in the night, check your email, and then scroll through social media until you realize you are now running 20 minutes late for work or class.

I am analyzing the amount of time spent on social media and the affects it can have on society and what benefits taking a break, or removing yourself from social media completely, can have on an individual.

To better understand this, I have reached out to my twitter followers and my Facebook friends to seek those that have taken a break from any social media cites. Taking data from users of Twitter and Facebook gave me a better variety of participants as my Twitter followers are primarily composed of people in their 20s. My Facebook friends list gave me the opportunity to reach out to former teachers, family friends, my grandmas friends, so I had a lot of diversity.

After posting Twitter responses as to why users took a hiatus from social media, I was able to post these responses to Facebook to see if public school teachers, public school teachers who are also parents and parents, could weigh in on the trends.

In addition, I was able to have a face to face conversation with someone who has quit social media and have found journals and articles from others that did the same.

The first journal I decided to analyze was from blogger, Jason Zoot, he ended his “30 Days Without Social Media” blog with a quote that states,

“My productivity, attention span and clarity of thought all increased greatly with living without social media for a month. I felt like I broke bad habits (refreshing feeds and checking notifications) in a very short period of time. If all of that can be done in just 30 days? It’s well worth trying.”

From this quote and my prior portion of research, I was curious to see how much time people spent on social media apps based on the percent of their battery they used and what the preferred social media cite was among different individuals and what they had in common. I once again reached out to Twitter and Facebook for this. I had much more responses for this than the break from social media question. I have intense (overwhelming) amounts of data for this from a very diverse group of ages.

It is important to understand our intense time investment to social media and think about this as our technology is constantly progressing. The analysis and understanding of what we devote our time to will help us predict what social media trends we can see in the future and which of those will be successful. Being able to understand how social media effect individuals can negatively is important to know so we can better modify these trends to have more of a positive impact.

A great example of this can be social media marketing, something that is on the rise and likely to only grow. According to the McRae Agency, “There is nothing like social media when it comes to cultivating a community. When your followers become part of your community, you gain instant access to them. That means you can find out what challenges they are facing and what they like and don’t like about your offerings. You can engage in ongoing dialog that can be more valuable than any kind of paid market research.” Reiterating the fact that knowing what people like and dislike helps these advancements.” They also touch on the idea of spreadability with a statement that “There is an old marketing adage that says it takes six to eight exposures to a product before a customer decides to buy. A clear benefit of social media is repeat exposure with your network. You have the opportunity to remind them over and over again about what you have to offer, which can shorten your sales cycles dramatically.” This also goes hand in hand with knowing how people respond on different cites and what they respond to. Therefore, on Twitter, we often see tweets from franchises that could be considered inappropriate. It is what people laugh at and retweet, and that what fuels the fire for marketers.

To support my research, I am using the book “Stand Our Light” by James Williams. I will be studying Williams thoughts of “The Spotlight, The Starlight and The Daylight with a specific focus to the Daylight and his thoughts on Epistemic distraction.” Epistemic distraction is diminishment of underlying capacities that enable a person to define or pursue their goals: capacities essential for democracy such as reflection, memory, prediction, leisure, reasoning, and goal-setting. This is where the distractions of the attention economy most directly undermine the foundations of democracy.” (68) My data that shows just how much time people spend on social media helps to support this. We have become increasingly reliant on our cell phones, social media, and the internet to help us through life. This reminds me of a story that Dr. Bollinger tells his students. A story along the lines of one of his former students at the grocery store and the person in front of her had a heart attack, her immediate thought was to go to her cell phone and google what to do rather than calling 911 so they could tell her how to help while sending an ambulance. While that is a societal example a social media example could be the new Spider Man, Tom Holland, accidentally revealing a movie poster and release date for Avengers: Infinity war, on Instagram live. He was so excited about this package and impressing his fans that he didn’t realize that there was a letter saying he was the first to see this and failed to see the large text on the back that read “CONFIDENTAL, DO NOT SHARE”.

To put it briefly, Williams describes Spotlight, Starlight and Daylight as “The “Spotlight” Our immediate capacities for navigating awareness and action toward tasks. Enables us to do what we want to do. The “Starlight” Our broader capacities for navigating life “by the stars” of our higher goals and values. Enables us to be who we want to be. The “Daylight” Our fundamental capacities – such as reflection, metacognition, reason, and intelligence – that enable us to define our goals and values to begin with. Enables us to “want what we want to want.” These three “lights” of attention pertain to doing, being, and knowing, respectively. When each of these “lights” gets obscured, a distinct - though not mutually exclusive – type of “distraction” results.” (49)  So, with the Tom Holland example, he was distracted by the desire to please his fans and probably wanted some attention from them, excitedly went to Instagram live and made a minor, but viral, mistake. This is just one of many examples that show our desire for attention and desire to spend our time on social media is getting out of hand. 

            This theory is well researched and can date as far back as 1899 when psychologists conducted research on why we need attention and what we invest our attention in and why. But it can be concluded the time consumption and investment of technology is a “newer” phenomenon that likely became known around 2007 with the release of the first iPhone, something I found from a Ted Talk presented by Adam Alter titled “Why our Screens Make Us Less Happy”. In this video he goes into depth on what we invest our time into and shows a graph that shows the increase in the time we spend in front of the screen.

In this book Williams begs the question “What do you pay when you pay attention? You pay with all the things you could have attended to, but didn’t: all the goals you didn’t pursue, all the actions you didn’t take, and all the possible yous you could have been, had you attended to those other things. Attention is paid in possible futures forgone.” (45) This helps reinforce the responses I received that claimed users were spending too much time on their social media accounts rather than focusing on what matters like school or relationships. It causes me to reflect to times I’ve been distracted by my phone. With the time we spend on social media or in front of any screen watching TV or playing video games, what else could we be doing? How many books could we have read or how many miles could be have walked?

            Truthfully, through these ideas, I have constantly had the vision of our future looking very similarly to the society of Wall-E. Fully dependent on technology, to a point where they live their lives on beds that do movement for them and provide a screen to the face. While this movie seemed to have more of an environmental focus, the screen time example is already happening. An author on Quora writes “People are already losing actual interaction by using things like Facebook and real-time and thinking it is bringing them closer to one another- But it’s actually making them more distant in a sense; whether they believe it or not.” I have recently decided to logout of my personal Instagram account, so it is no longer accessible on my phone. When sharing this with friends it was agreed that the ability to have a quick text conversation to catch up is decreasing the desire and value of a face to face conversation.

Works Cited

“10 Reasons Social Media Marketing Works.” McRae Agency, 19 Mar. 2013, www.mcraeagency.com/10-reasons-social-media-marketing-works/.

Beauregard, Kenny. “Will Humanity End up like What Was Portrayed in the Movie ‘Wall-E’?” What Is the Difference between SAP HANA and s4hana? - Quora, www.quora.com/Will-humanity-end-up-like-what-was-portrayed-in-the-movie-Wall-E.

“Tom Holland Accidentally Reveals Poster For Avengers: Infinity War And Release Date.” YouTube, YouTube, 28 Nov. 2017, www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKFy_pyK7E8.

“What I Learned From a 30-Day Social Media Detox.” JasonDoesStuff, by Jason Zook, 6 Mar. 2018, jasondoesstuff.com/social-media-detox-recap/#final.

Williams, James. Stand out of Our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy. Cambridge University Press, 2018.