People often speak about how detrimental social media is for young minds, an epidemic of screens. What people don’t speak about, is social media, in contrast with the effects of physical media. Now for the sake of this argument, I am classifying film as physical media because it is not social, and shares the same characteristics of most physical media in that it has a theme and characters. This week I began reading a novel called The Things They Carried by Tim O’brien. I am around half way through and it is full of heartbreaking and sentimental writing that forces the reader to come to terms with their own personal morals. I have read many books like this, and I have read many poems like this. I have watched many films centered around this. What I can definitively say is that as much as I enjoy this genre of work, it has also had some negative effect on me, comparable to doom scrolling.
In the same way that rotting our brains and perpetually being glued to blue light is bad for us, constantly being in your own head is also bad. There is a healthy mix, and often this idea that eliminating social media entirely is the solution to mental health is spread, when that might not actually be the case. Everyone is different, and I am in no way here to tell you what is best for you. However I am here to tell my own personal experience. Think about movies that have come out in the last two years. Barbie, Oppenheimer, Deadpool and Wolverine, It Ends With Us. All movies largely advertised and enjoyed by the public, all movies with some sentimentality or varying negative emotion attached. The same argument does not work for books because they are produced so fast that it is hard to keep track of, however as a reader I know what has been popular the last few years. A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara, Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, The Secret History by Donna Tartt, Normal People by Sally Rooney. All exponentially successful novels that have seen popularity in the last few years, and they are all bleak stories with terrible endings. I have read every single one of those novels, and they are fantastically written. They also, though, had a major consequence on me. They changed how I view things, life, and while that is a good thing, people should not always be faced with media, something meant for enjoyment, that is going to send them into a philosophical hole comparable to a Dostoyevsky novel.
At the end of the day, all of these things were created for enjoyment. There is a lot of cherry picking around these topics though. Books are so good for you, as long as you don’t read the bad ones. Why can’t we apply this argument to social media then? It can be beneficial as long as used appropriately, because there are positive sides to the internet. All I’m saying is that there is a double standard around entertainment and it is time we talk about it.