Digital Disconnection

Let’s have an honest chat real quick. I want to get off my chest some thoughts I have on this whole digital addiction that our society has. We are dreadfully reliant on entertainment. We could be watching a TV show, scrolling through social media reels or even flicking through our photo album when we have no access to the internet, whilst waiting at the bus stop (I have absolutely done that). These common screens that we see every day are practically drugs. They’re addicting. We depend on them for that dopamine rush and serotonin boost. I would even suggest that, for many individuals, myself included, it has been a way of escaping the complexities of life. 

I am a Zoomer (someone from Gen Z). When I was a child, my only sources of technology were the family box TV,  my Nintendo DSi and my father’s laptop that I would occasionally use to do homework. Other than that, my sister and I depended on something that provided the BEST entertainment. 

Imagination.

We would create all sorts of games. Sometimes we were teachers, maybe doctors, vets, princesses, shopkeepers and even librarians! We had fancy dress costumes to mess around in, board and card games and a beautiful Barbie house filled with dolls, which I still have to this day. Every evening, instead of scrolling on an iPad, we would love to read our books. Sometimes my mum had to force me to put a book down so that I would sleep. And this was when we were in the house. Never mind when we were outdoors. We would jump on the trampoline, play on the swings, ride our bikes, go to the park, visit a garden centre, take a splash in the swimming pool, and have a picnic with our friends. What a beautiful time.

My parents never bought my sister and me iPads, so when a family friend offered to give us one they were trying to get rid of, screen time was monitored. We couldn’t go on the iPad unless all the homework was done, and once we could use it, we knew that we couldn’t waste the whole day on it. The only time the rules were slightly more lenient was during holiday seasons, as we would use the iPad to find movies to watch. But even then, we would still use it to be creative by making movies and music videos with our friends. At the end of the day, we knew how to entertain ourselves without the need for a screen to be present. 

Unfortunately, things drastically took a turn once I entered secondary school. Everything was digital. From doing your research, writing your homework, checking your emails, to communicating with friends online and keeping an eye out for the next upload from your favourite YouTuber. It all became dependent on these devices. Before I knew it, I stopped using my imagination to have fun. Free time looked like scrolling on YouTube and seeing what people were uploading on Instagram or Snapchat. Spending time with my sister? Drastically dropped. That’s probably what I regret the most. I became absorbed in this digital world, and not even deliberately. What do you do when schools rely on technology for everything? What do you do when you return from school and then have to spend the entire evening on a laptop to complete homework? Or when you’ve completed your work, but now your friends are online, wanting to talk about what happened at school or the latest trend they want to take part in? I remember my sister saying to my mum, “She doesn’t spend time with me anymore.” Gosh, if I could turn back the clocks and give her the biggest hug and agree to play whatever it was she wanted.

By the time I went off to university, my sister was now the one to enter into that stage as she was now in Secondary School. Suddenly, I was the one who wanted to spend time with her whenever I had free time, but she was now texting her friends and doing masses amount of homework and studying online. The pandemic certainly didn’t help with schools, workplaces and even shops, as everything had to become accessible digitally. Now I feel I am experiencing the repercussions of it, and it’s bad. How so?

Because I find nearly nothing entertaining anymore, yet I still scroll in the hopes of finding something. Doomscrolling has sadly become a habit of mine. When I was bored: scrolling. When I was sad or anxious: scrolling. When I wanted to relax after a long day, scrolling. When I didn’t want to eat lunch in silence: scrolling. The list just goes on. The most concerning thing that genuinely caused alarm bells to go off was that I started doing it subconsciously. I would exit Instagram, and not even a second later, go straight back onto it without realising. Another half an hour would go by just like that, and then I’d realise “wait, I’m sure I just came off it, how did I get back on it again?”. And I know for a fact that I’m not the only one. But that’s not even close to the end of it.

Since so many people are desperate for entertainment, it is getting harder and harder for these content creators or producers to catch the attention of the viewer. I remember learning at university that you have approximately 2-3 seconds for your content to engage your audience. If you fail, it’s too late. They’ve scrolled on. To me, that’s ridiculous. Not only that, but people’s attention span and ability to concentrate are drastically deteriorating. Everyone wants everything summarised rather than watching a whole video. They ask for the ‘paragraph guy’ (a term used to describe the one person who has taken the time to watch the whole video and then writes a summary in the comments section to save other people from having to watch it). If it’s not a video format, thanks to AI tools like ChatGPT, you can simply insert text into the chat and ask it to give you a summary with the key points. 

Honourable mention, I really do feel for teachers as they spend all their time trying to teach content and material to students who, unfortunately, are unable to concentrate for a 45-minute lesson. My boyfriend worked as a TA in a special intervention department to support students who may have struggled in class or in the general school environment for one reason or another. He would constantly tell me how shocked he was by the number of kids who would request to be taken out of class 5 minutes into a lesson because they were unable to concentrate and would rather play with LEGO in the other room. This is beyond concerning, and I truly hope that the UK government implements laws like other nations are starting to do regarding controlling social media access for young people. My respect to all the hard-working teachers out there who are giving their all and dealing with an issue that no previous generation has ever dealt with. You’re all superheroes! 

Anyway, I want to bring this all back to the point I want to make and the reason for the title of this post. I haven’t gone into too much depth on this subject matter as it is a large one, but even just sharing a few thoughts has helped me process what sort of action I need to take in my own life. When I saw the notification on my phone Friday evening reporting that I had spent 10 hours using my screen (NOT including my laptop), I knew I had to call an emergency meeting with myself. Now more aware of my poor digital habits, I have decided that I need to go back to being like a child. To use my imagination and be creative again. That’s how I got back onto writing on this website. I figured, “if I can spend hours upon hours scrolling mindlessly on my phone, I can sacrifice a couple of hours to write something.” Not only do I get to use my imagination and creativity to think of what I want to write about, but I also gain valuable skills like written communication, producing and curating work for an audience, and putting my graphic design degree into good use as I build a website. I also want to gain knowledge about SEO, as I know that it is very useful to know about, especially if I want to grow as a copywriter and will need to understand what grabs attention quickest. I think I may be rambling a little bit, but that’s sort of the point at the moment. I mentioned in a previous post that I am not striving for perfection. I simply want to grow. And this is all part of it. 

So if I want this to become a valuable asset for me in the future, and claim my creativity and time back, the first thing I’m going to have to do is switch on that ‘Do Not Disturb’.

Love,

me. 🤍