Everyone knows that spending hours scrolling on the networks is not good and that morality is really not a priority of social networking platforms – uncertainties that have been verified again thanks to the Facebook Papers. Documents revealed by whistleblower Frances Haugen reveal that Facebook is perfectly aware the damage it causes in other countries and seems more determined to capture the eyes of Internet users than to ensure the well-being of the brains behind. According to his own studies, reported to the Wall Street Journal by Haugen last September, Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, is making teenage body image problems worse.
Misinformation undermines democracy and the self-esteem of the next generation – major issues that somehow seem intractable. However, there is one thing that can be done right away, without the help of social media platforms, to dramatically improve your experience: restrict your account to private mode, then drastically reduce the number of people you follow. and who follow you. Like most millennials in my age bracket, I don’t use Facebook much, so the rest of this argument will be focused on Instagram. Limiting the number of people you follow is a small but effective way to improve your life, and it works on any platform.
Eject the pilate teacher
If the correct number varies according to each one, it is nevertheless limited to a few hundred. You may have heard of the Dunbar number, according to which humans are biologically unable to maintain real connections with more than 150 people, which appears to be nearly true even on social networks. While some researchers consider this limit to be psycho-pop stupidities, trying to seriously follow thousands of people seems like an undoubtedly doomed business (Instagram lets you follow 7,500 people).
The idea is to decide on a cap yourself and stick to it. This will be difficult, because a fixed cap makes the app overall less interesting (which is good, in the end). It also forces you to make choices. Are you making a new relationship at work, or running into adorable animal lovers? If you want to follow them on Insta, you’ll have to kick out a pilates teacher or a cousin’s cousin. More importantly, a fixed cap can prevent you from developing too much parasocial relationships. In my experience, these are the worst, the most likely to involve professionals whose job is to present a certain image on the app.
Besides, you can never know if someone you have never met retouch its flaws with great blows of Facetune. Virtually following a bunch of people you don’t know in real life is often the secret to jealous frustration. This negativity is compounded by the fact that many of them are trying to sell stuff, from vitamins to wellness coaching to “Therapies”. Even for a sophisticated consumer, it can be difficult to spot the scam right away on a social network that supposedly serves to connect you with your friends.
Nothing good ever comes out of random Instagram crawling.
But this ceiling of friends is not enough. You must also stay away from Explorer pages and Reels! While individual Reels can be cool (for example, those posted by one of the people you’ve carefully chosen to follow), on the dedicated page Instagram provides an uninterrupted feed. And nothing good ever comes out of random Instagram crawling – it always ends up buying hundred dollars of bralettes which will start to unravel after two months of wearing (a totally random example, of course), or by frantically observing photos of the dog of your colo’s sweetheart’s ex-girlfriend strolling in exotic places.
Why isn’t your dog behaving like this? Are your ex’s exes as sexy? Is it something in your body that has provoked this bra wear? And that is when it goes relatively well. At worst, you risk ending up with a catchphrase that refuses to leave your head (thank you, Reels / TikToks transferred to Reels), or trigger an eating disorder.
Poor cover-ups
Is this advice to limit yourself hard to follow, and do I speak for myself as much as for others? Absoutely. I spent long minutes last night typing “unsubscribe” and “withdraw” over and over again in an attempt to bring my subscribers and subscriptions back below the 200 mark. There is no doubt that I will repeat the exercise. when I realize that events have surreptitiously escaped me again.
It would be so nice if Instagram provided a way to set a cap and not have access to Explore or Reels. The measures proposed at the moment, such as the possibility of hide the number of likes, are just poor stripes. The “you are up to date” notification that appears in your feed when you have seen all the content of the people you follow doesn’t make much sense since the app immediately starts offering you Instagram accounts you don’t know as long as you keep looking.
But of course, social media apps are designed for you to spend time on, as the Facebook Papers painfully reminds us, not to be used in healthy moderation. This summer, Facebook banned a user for creating an app that made it easy for others to unsubscribe from everyone (thus eliminating the news feeds, but allowing to continue to consult the pages of the friends). Knowing this, just limiting your thread to a small group of people is a tiny act of rebellion.
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Of course, there is always the possibility to log out entirely and delete our apps. But Instagram isn’t a bad thing in and of itself. It’s nice to see the life of his friends: the flora and fauna of their garden, their little work problems, their existential anxieties posted on their “close friends” list in the Stories, the heads of their babies at different stages of their life. There is one fundamental element in the Facebook universe that is right on target, it’s nice to be connected with other people. On the other hand, it really isn’t to be connected to the whole world.
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