Being a Social Media Moderate in the Digital Age

The dangers of social media are old news; we’ve all heard that it’s making us more depressed, more narcissistic and less engaged with the real world. In a recent iteration of social media panic, some members of Congress have proposed a TikTok ban, the legality of which is now being considered by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.

Vance Ginn recently wrote in Discourse about the negative effects of such a ban, explaining how it would restrict both civil liberties and economic opportunities. But I’d argue that, even if those bad outcomes weren’t an issue, we shouldn’t ban TikTok or any other social media platform. While the technology is certainly susceptible to overuse or harmful use, it can also bring entertainment and connection to people’s lives. Social media isn’t an unalloyed good or a scourge upon humanity—it’s a tool, and how we use it is up to us.

Avoiding the pitfalls associated with social media is, I think, uniquely easy for me—not because of any particular virtue or character strength I possess, but because of my age. I was born in 1985, which makes me an “elder millennial.” As such, I’m a member of the last generation to come of age before the internet was an integral part of everyday life. I had computer classes in elementary school, but they mostly focused on developing typing skills, though I do vaguely remember a school librarian showing us how to access the library’s online catalog via the fancy dial-up internet connection. I was a teenager when my parents finally got a home computer, and at the time I mostly used it to type (and, later, research) school papers and chat with my crush on AOL Instant Messenger. I also played a fair amount of the cutting-edge computer games of the day: Solitaire and Minesweeper.

As for social media, it didn’t really become prevalent until I was a young adult. Facebook came on the scene during my college years, which was briefly exciting. (I believe I’m still “friends” with a bunch of people I had maybe one class with, or met at a party, despite never speaking to them again in real life.) But by the time Twitter and Instagram came along, I wasn’t particularly interested; these new platforms felt like novelties for the kids, not like something that would or should be important to adults. While I eventually jumped on the Twitter bandwagon (but rarely open the app these days), to this day I don’t have an account with Instagram, Snapchat or TikTok.

Because my generation came of age alongside the internet, I think we’re uniquely positioned to relate to social media in a healthy way. We’re not “digital natives” like those who grew up with the internet, but neither are we unfamiliar with the digital world like those significantly older than us. Rather, we’re digitally literate. We may spend some (and occasionally too much) of our time scrolling social media feeds, but it’s not the air we breathe.

Recently in Discourse, Andrey Mir claimed that social media has ceased to become a mere tool; it’s an environmental force that affects and shapes us whether we want it to or not. I agree that social media does influence us all, regardless of age—and quite possibly it affects me more than I realize—but I think its effects are most pronounced on the younger generations who have never known a life offline. For me, scrolling social media is something I might do while in line at the grocery store, but it’s not how I’m spending hours of my time every day. I’m still old enough to prefer a movie, a TV show or a good book.

Ultimately, I think we should follow the elder millennials’ example and detach from social media a bit. Find other ways to spend your leisure time. Forge friendships in meatspace rather than relying on parasocial “relationships” with influencers. Touch grass, as they say. We need to remember, in this very online age, that social media is not real life. It’s just one tool among many to enhance the life we already have.

Meanwhile ...

What I’m Reading: I recently unearthed a book that had been sitting on my shelves unread for years, “Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks: Fifty Years of Mysteries in the Making” by John Curran. It’s an exploration and analysis of Agatha Christie’s notebooks, in which she jotted down the ideas and worked out the plots that would eventually become her published works. I found Curran’s book a bit dry, to be honest—it’s definitely for the die-hard Christie aficionados rather than the casual fans—but it did remind me just how much I love Christie’s mysteries and inspired me to reread her “And Then There Were None” now that “spooky season” is upon us!

I vividly remember the first Christie novel I read, “Murder in Retrospect,” when I was about 11 or 12. Before that, I’d enjoyed mysteries that were aimed at children, such as the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew series, but I had no idea how compelling the genre could be. Christie’s novel had an intricate plot, a clearly defined circle of suspects (all, of course, with a motive for murder) and a wealth of clues that were subtle at the time but made perfect sense in hindsight. My favorite thing about the book was that it “played fair” with the reader: If you were clever enough to pick up on Christie’s hints, you could identify the killer before she revealed the solution at the end of the novel.

After that, I was hooked, embarking on a long and happy Christie binge—and with 66 novels, plus assorted short stories and plays, it took me a few years! Not only are her stories elaborate puzzles to solve, but they also share the hallmark of most genre fiction: an emotionally satisfying ending. In the end, the murderer is unmasked, justice is served (even if it’s not always through the legal system) and order is restored to society. It’s a comforting fiction in an uncertain, shades-of-gray world.

Latest Stories

• Daniel M. Rothschild, “We Need More Costly Signaling”

• Michael Puttré, “Nothing Achieves Peace Better Than Victory”

• David Masci, “The Wages of Fecklessness”

• Jon Gabriel, “My Feelings Don't Care About Your Facts”

• Emily Hamilton, “More Housing, Less Participatory Democracy”

• Jack Salmon, “Tax Expenditures for the Chopping Block: Energy Subsidies”

From the Archives

• Robert Tracinski, “The Attack on Israel Gives Us a Glimpse of the Inferno”

• Joe Romance, “‘Right-Sizing’ the Presidency”

• Maarten Boudry, “Despite Climate Change, Today Is the Best Time To Be Born”