How the Social Media Outage Highlighted a Need for Balance
On Monday, October 5th, the world experienced a major break from communication – a social media outage lasting for about six hours. While we are all still living, breathing, and have successfully survived this life altering day, the results truly created a tidal wave of emotions for many and brought to light just how reliant our personal lives and work lives are on social media.
Although this outage created quite a splash, it also created an opportunity for conversation about social media dependency and how much of an impact social media has on our daily lives. Major publications, influencers, and companies around the world have contributed to this conversation and their headlines highlighted the weight of the outage’s impact –
New York Times: “Gone in Minutes, Out for Hours: Outage Shakes Facebook”
Fox News: “SOCIAL MEDIA OUTAGE CAUSES AN IMPACT ON OUR COMMUNITY”
The Guardian: “It was scary at first’: social media users on the Facebook outage”
CNN: “Facebook went offline this week. Experts say we should log out, too”
NPR: “More than social media: The WhatsApp outage affected small businesses worldwide”
Many of these conversations highlighted the fact that social media is an around-the-clock platform that people have come to depend on for entertainment, joy, socialization, connectivity, profitability and more. While social media may have started as a fun way to connect with friends, it has grown into a platform that has far greater power and affect on our wellbeing.
When social media has gone down before, the main question asked was “how long is this going to last?”. This time the outage sparked more thought provoking and long-term questions like:
- What will happen if I can’t post at the opportune time?
- What will happen if I cannot connect with my audience?
- Will other channels be as effective as Facebook and Instagram for promoting my brand?
- Will I lose business from this outage?
- How will this affect my social life?
- What are I am going to do?
- Do I really need social media as much as I think I do?
These questions might seem ludicrous now, but in the heat of the moment they came along with stress and anxiety for individuals and companies that depend on social media for the prosperity of their businesses/brand. As the day continued and social media remained down, it forced people to find real life interactions and focus on personal connections. Since there was nothing new on social media to constantly check in with, people looked to other resources for their entertainment. This outage brought reality back into play for many people, taking the focus off of the “virtual world” we have come to rely on and bringing notice back into the reality of our days.
Fast forward to present day – one month later after the outage. Even though the dust has settled and things are back to business as usual, it is important to remember the outage and strive for a healthy usage of social media. As we move forward, consider integrating these factors into your daily social media engagement:
- Schedule controlled windows for time on social media. Consider turning on the screen time option on your personal devices to keep yourself accountable of how much time you spend scrolling on social media.
- Make an effort to start meaningful connections in person, not just online. It can be so easy to feel connected with our community by constantly checking social media to find out what others are up to. Instead, reach out to them directly or make plans to get together to get to know them on a level deeper than surface level social media.
- Consider deleting social media apps from your phone to resist the temptation. For many of us, checking our social media pages regularly throughout the day has become a habit. We are constantly striving to be connected and in the know, and many of times we log on to our accounts without even realizing it.
It’s important to remember that social media isn’t a bad thing, in fact these platforms have become great ways to stay connected, advertise businesses, and create movements within our society. Within that, it is important to regulate and keep ourselves accountable for how much time we spend online and how much we rely on social media for joy. The social media outage was an effective circumstance that highlighted our dependency, and how unaware some of us are of that dependency. We have the opportunity to reset and create healthy boundaries for ourselves, so let’s begin by moving forward with balance in mind.
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