Image Attribution: “Assignment 3 part A, social networking sites.” by Hugues Ishimwe Bradley is licensed under CC0. (See interactive map)
Visa 1500 – Introduction to visual culture
Created by: Hugues Bradley Ishimwe
Created for: Terryl Atkins
Part A: Social Networking sites critique
The social network site that I use a lot more often than the other is Twitter, I find myself using Twitter not only to keep up with what’s going on around the world but also to communicate with some of my closest friends. During quarantine, I would tend to use Twitter for at least 3 hours a day, so I started to restrict my daily limit to 1-1.5 hours a week. I would often remain in between my daily limit but more than often I would at on an hour or two when I got bored. I used to tweet more than twice a day and interact with other fellow users, and communicate with the users in multiple group chats. what happens with a high daily average of usage is great mass consumption of information that might not even affect the area you live in. After setting the limit I made it my goal to reduce my usage of the app and in three days managed to stop posting and just stick to mass consumption of information. “social media addiction’ comes with all the behavioral signals that we might usually associate with chemical addictions, such as smoking or alcoholism” conveys the withdrawals some may face while reducing the usage of an SNS, I completely agree with the statement as I went through mood changes and loss of appetite as I was generally disinterested with what was going on around me. My favorite thing about the app was I enjoyed the humor as it was fairly simple and had the same general format as it followed the trend that was currently going on.
The current state of my relationship with apps like Twitter(SNS) is something I try to keep in check, as “Twitter users…go on to spend hours, if not whole afternoons, obsessively refreshing the platform” its a platform where arguments could go on for days and it is not good for your mental health. My goal is to keep the new routine I have made of spending even less than 30 minutes on the SNS and I will try to find other better platforms to migrate to.
Works Cited
Manavis, Sarah, et al. “Why Can’t We Just Quit Twitter?” New Statesman, 13 Aug. 2019, https://www.newstatesman.com/science-tech/2019/08/why-cant-we-just-quit-twitter.
Galer, Sophia Smith. “How Much Is ‘Too Much Time’ on Social Media?” BBC Future, BBC, https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20180118-how-much-is-too-much-time-on-social-media.