We All Secretly Hate Our Phones?
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Within a short space of time, social media has become a frequent topic of discussion with friends. We would never previously speak about this subject unless we were disecting a celebrity Instagram post or explaining something we "read online" (This is code for I watched someone on TikTok sit in their car and talk at the camera.)
Yet now I find myself often mentioning the negative aspects of social media rather than the positives, it seems like the once unfaltering 'magic' of social media is beginning to fade. I now tire at the thought of scrolling aimlessly through 15 second clips for 4 hours, I never thought that day would come! I am hyper-conscious of how I'm wasting my time, and I feel guilty about it.
Sometimes I get weirdly excited when an informative video comes up on my feed because if someone was to ask what I was doing then I would have the right to say "It's educational, actually."
The main difficulty I have with social media, especially Instagram, is that it feels like we end up knowing too much. The constant bombardment of information is exhausting, I know the names of so many people, brands, trends etc. Some of the information is welcomed but most is unwanted and largely useless. I think it would actually be nice to unlearn the thousands of names, to start afresh and be able to choose what I would like to know.
A friend once told me that when he spends hours on his phone he starts to wonder what his parents would have been doing at his age in order to pass the time. It's hard to imagine a world where you couldn't just pick up a screen and entertain yourself when bored, people used to spend more quality time with one another or learn a new hobby. There is an obvious lack of young people who have hobbies, this is why so many of us have taken up running, climbing and DJing in recent years. Until last year I don’t think I had ever even heard of a 'run club', yet now they are everywhere and most of the participants are in their early twenties. Fitness brands are marketing their products to a younger demographic once again and there's been an obvious increase in young people starting their own companies.
I believe there is a direct correlation between our generation's excessive social media usage and the ever rising popularity of off-grid festivals and events.
Throughout the 90's and even early 2000's, Festivals attracted a very specific type of person. Someone that had an extensive knowledge of dance music and liked to spend their time in nature, this may also be a slight generalisation. However, it is now commonplace for almost all young people to attend these festivals yearly. This has only started happening in the last 15 years and new festivals are popping up every couple of months.
Of course people attend festivals for the social aspect and the music, but there is also something so freeing about getting to leave your phone in a tent and forget about it all for a couple of days. There is no expectation for you to reply to people or answer their calls, because everybody knows you probably don’t have service.
"Sorry mate, my portable died on the first day!"
Companies are catching on to the demand for technological silence, it is becoming more and more common to see music events advertising a 'no-phone' policy, and we don’t see anybody complaining.
In August, Amsterdam’s No Art festival ruled that anyone attending must place their phone in a plastic envelope at the entrance. The Guardian explains this new phenomenon in an article named ‘The party is back’, exploring the domino effect started by the European festivals introducing this policy.
Gunn Enli, a professor at Oslo University, discusses how one drawback of the 'no-phone' policy is that companies are still heavily relying on digital ‘word of mouth’ marketing to promote their events. Most of these events gain traction from social media and there is no more successful form of marketing than free marketing, such as people using hashtags on posts or location tags on stories. So are businesses willing to risk a decline in sales in order to push this disturbance-free party agenda?
She continues to examine the emerging feeling that visibly filming at events or taking pictures is now being seen as “cringe”. There is a new status given to people who refuse to record in the crowd, as if it’s the new cool;
““There is now more social cache to not being seen as a slave to social media.””
It seems many young people feel slightly saddened by the fact that they were the first generation to grow up alongside social media. I often see videos of people showing photos of their parents partying in the 90's and the comments are flooded with people noticing the lack of bright phone screens.
Possibly all festivals and music events will enforce the ‘no-phone’ policy in the coming years, and maybe the party really is back!
