Who wants us to keep connected, hyper-connected, or disconnected?
The “Facebook break” experiment
By Paul Scott Canavan , Tweet from Sep 10, 2021, 5:00PM
About two weeks ago, when I decided to take a break from Facebook, I started reviewing the literature on social media harmful effects, disconnection experiments, and if and what made that experience either better or worse for neurodivergent people. The results have surprised me in stages. Stages of surprise, if you will.
Surprise is always about incorrect assumptions, and these usually derive from naivete. For example, I assumed “everybody knew” that social media was, for most people, harmful at some level. I assumed a consensus that doesn’t exist.
Now, by using different search expressions I detected a few completely different approaches to the problem. They included approaches stemming from the opposite assumption: that social media was primarily beneficial to individuals and to society.
The quick fix for this methodological mistake is testing social stratification: I hypothesized that tech companies and those defending neoliberal economic measures would be the “pro-social media” agents, while views informed by the imperative of economic equality, reflected on the short term demand of corporate regulation, would be defended by those critical of current social media. In other words, testing the association of a behavior to a social segment.
And I was wrong again.
There was a consensus building effort by a significant part of the scientific community in the direction of adopting regulatory measures over the activities of tech companies. This effort was a major drive in research until a few years back, and those of us not in the fields of information science, communication, and related areas also shared it. That consensus building effort informed policy-making and the public conversation about misinformation, freedom of speech, among other issues.
Almost immediately, an opposition to this narrative emerged from different corners of the ideological landscape. In academia, the hypothesized reason for the alleged beneficial effect included the privileged opportunity to explore alternative identities, short-circuiting the taboo impediments to this discussion in mainstream institutional spaces.
Those of us expecting violent and open disputes over social media’s harmful effects saw nothing of the sort. Instead, tech companies have been promoting what became known as “digital well-being” and “digital detox”, including a vast array of features and apps to help individuals regulate their interaction with digital communication platforms.
Tech companies intensely oppose regulatory policies, but this time they are doing it intelligently: they have co opted several progressive voices. With the exception of the caricatural statements by the likes of Ellon Musk or other far right pundits, tech companies did not oppose the critical arguments directly. They agreed with us, but shifted the arguments in another direction.
“Regulation” became mainstream in a shift from economic and societal regulation of private corporations to the hype language of wellness and disability studies. Tech companies are more than happy to help individuals “self-regulate”, with an abundance of new features and apps for people to measure how much screen time they are spending in a day, or to make their use of screen time more “mindful” and “deliberate”. As long as it is not institutional regulation of private capital, corporations have shown to be apt at articulating even the most (performatively) emancipatory discourses.
What is known as the “age of deregulation” was inaugurated by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher during their tenure over their respective executive offices, and written into law in 1999 in the USA, when Congress repealed the Glass-Steagall Act. Since then, the global economy has been more and more intensely ruled by gigantic cartels, an ecosystem where tech companies are top predators.
Tech companies are framing the conversation like commercial radio stations did a century back: by normalizing the idea that what they offer is a “social good”, and as such, should not be strongly regulated.
As tech companies short circuited the debate about regulatory measures by shifting the regulatory responsibility to individuals, they also co-opted important actors into it. Most identity-based movements make intense use of social media, where they harvest their constituents' social capital and dispute power with other movements. Their narrative is reflected in a relevant segment of the academic community, resulting in several publications about the benefits of social media for the minority they represent.
That is true for the minority to which I nominally belong, the neurodivergent or the autistic community.
Is facebook more beneficial or more detrimental to neurodivergents type a, or b, or c? We don’t know, and we’ll probably never know. For the authors who claim social media is essentially beneficial, collective identity building through social media activism is critical to the well-being of autistic, or neurodivergent people. They are not wrong, but this is fragment of the answer.
An agreement was established between apparently unlikely allies: tech companies and identity politics/interest group leaders. There is a lot of synergy between them, now that they share a common lexicon, promote self-regulation, and engage in many other performative/propaganda acts. Propaganda is more critical than ever for corporations, social movements, governments, and other entities.
This alliance is not that different from the one between multinational pharmaceutical companies and the fat movement in promoting the adoption of obesity as a disability, in campaigning for specific rights, and for the approval of new (and expensive, and under patent protection) anti-obesity drugs. Everyone is happy except for the low income people victimized by the inverse calorie density:price ratio and the resultant high obesity prevalence in that demographic, and who have no chance of benefiting from the new drugs.
What I concluded from the past weeks’ readings is that digital disconnect is actually frowned upon by most social actors in this debate. Nobody wants you or me to disconnect, and, at least partially evade the social control rendered by social media to corporations, government institutions, and interest groups’ leaders.
If all these actors - tech companies, governments, movement leaders - oppose disconnecting from social media, who defends it? Lots of people who have used social media for more than entertainment, and got hurt, such as journalists, activists, researchers and concerned citizens in general. At some point, many feel the need to step back and regain control over aspects of their lives being ruled by third parties. And when we do it, it’s important to know who is in our corner.
References and further reading
Abeele, M. M. V., Halfmann, A., & Lee, E. W. (2022). Drug, demon, or donut? Theorizing the relationship between social media use, digital well-being and digital disconnection. Current Opinion in Psychology, 45, 101295. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352250X21002475
Beattie, A., & Daubs, M. S. (2020). Framing'digital well-being'as a social good. First Monday. https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/10430
Brownlow, C., Bertilsdotter Rosqvist, H., & O'Dell, L. (2015). Exploring the potential for social networking among people with autism: Challenging dominant ideas of ‘friendship’. Scandinavian Journal of Disability Research, 17(2), 18-193. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15017419.2013.859174
Büchi, M. (2021). Digital well-being theory and research. New Media & Society, 14614448211056851. - https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/14614448211056851
Fan, H., Du, W., Dahou, A., Ewees, A. A., Yousri, D., Elaziz, M. A., ... & Al-qaness, M. A. (2021). Social media toxicity classification using deep learning: real-world application UK Brexit. Electronics, 10(11), 1332. - https://www.mdpi.com/2079-9292/10/11/1332
Gillespie-Smith, K., Hendry, G., Anduuru, N., Laird, T., & Ballantyne, C. (2021). Using social media to be ‘social’: Perceptions of social media benefits and risk by autistic young people, and parents. Research in Developmental Disabilities, 118, 104081. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0891422221002304
Graham, S., Mason, A., Riordan, B., Winter, T., & Scarf, D. (2021). Taking a break from social media improves wellbeing through sleep quality. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, 24(6), 421-425.. https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/cyber.2020.0217
Haidt, J., & Allen, N. (2020). Scrutinizing the effects of digital technology on mental health. - https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00296-x
Hanley, S. M., Watt, S. E., & Coventry, W. (2019). Taking a break: The effect of taking a vacation from Facebook and Instagram on subjective well-being. Plos one, 14(6), e0217743. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article -
Jorge, A. (2019). Social media, interrupted: users recounting temporary disconnection on Instagram. Social Media+ Society, 5(4), 2056305119881691. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/2056305119881691
Jorge, A., Amaral, I., & de Matos Alves, A. (2022). “Time well spent”: the ideology of temporal disconnection as a means for digital well-being. International Journal of Communication, 16, 1551-1572. https://r-libre.teluq.ca/2798/1/18148-62724-1-PB.pdf
Lambert, J., Barnstable, G., Minter, E., Cooper, J., & McEwan, D. (2022). Taking a one-week break from social media improves well-being, depression, and anxiety: a randomized controlled trial. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, 25(5), 287-293, .https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/cyber.2021.0324 -
Nguyen, M. H., Büchi, M., & Geber, S. (2022). Everyday disconnection experiences: Exploring people’s understanding of digital well-being and management of digital media use. new media & society, 14614448221105428. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/14614448221105428
Page, X., Capener, A., Cullen, S., Wang, T., Garfield, M., & J. Wisniewski, P. (2022, April). Perceiving Affordances Differently: The Unintended Consequences When Young Autistic Adults Engage with Social Media. In Proceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-21). https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3491102.3517596
Przybylski, A. K., Nguyen, T. V. T., Law, W., & Weinstein, N. (2021). Does taking a short break from social media have a positive effect on well-being? Evidence from three preregistered field experiments. Journal of Technology in Behavioral Science, 6, 507-514.. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s41347-020-00189-w - Does Taking a Short Break from Social Media Have a Positive Effect on Well-being? Evidence from Three Preregistered Field Experiments
Vanden Abeele, M. M., & Nguyen, M. H. (2022). Digital well-being in an age of mobile connectivity: An introduction to the Special Issue. Mobile Media & Communication, 10(2), 174-189. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/20501579221080899
Wang, T., Garfield, M., Wisniewski, P., & Page, X. (2020, October). Benefits and challenges for social media users on the autism spectrum. In Conference companion publication of the 2020 on computer supported cooperative work and social computing (pp. 419-424). https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3406865.3418322
Wikimedia Foundation. (2023, July 3). Digital Detox. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_detox
Wikipedia Contributors. (2019, January 10). Right to disconnect. Wikipedia; Wikimedia Foundation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_disconnect