Give yourself a break - limit social media

As a further consequence of this, we are now building transactional relationships with machines. A number of studies reveal that we tend not to remember what we learn on the internet as much as where we found it. We rely on Pocket, Evernote or a similar Cloud-based programme to actually store the content we read.  Again, the consequence is that there is little potential for connecting new information with old inside the human brain; there’s little room for creating something new.

Another challenge with social media is that in the process of exposing us to so many new people, it reveals how many interestingindividuals we could know but don’t. Again, this potentially sets us up for the feeling that we’re somehow falling short, especially if our online “friends” seem always to have more “followers” than us. There is the danger that we can expend so much energy trying to attract new online contacts – most of whom will represent only surface-level connections – that we have little left to invest in new or existing offline friends, with whom we might form much deeper bonds.

Finally here, let’s consider the growing body of evidence for increasing levels of social disinhibition among many new media users.Psychologists have noted how often people say things online that they’d never dream of saying offline. Bullying and trolling represent the most extreme manifestations of this problem, but its impact can be felt on a much wider level.

In one British study, two percent of 2,000 British people admitted to having insulted someone they didn’t know online within a given year.

That doesn’t sound like many people, but if you extrapolate it over the entire UK population, it represents one million people insulting one million other people vai the internet, which is hardly helpful for social cohesion in an age of alienation.

Social media have presented us with many wonderful opportunities. Not the least of these is the capacity to collaborate in innovative ways across vast distances, potentially solving previously intractable problems. Mass innovation is now bearing fruit in the worlds of medicine, education, technology, science, business and more. There is no place for Luddism here. Yet it is worth remembering that technology is amoral. Our collective future will not be the product of the technologies we use, but of how we as human agents choose to use and develop them.

The University of Copenhagen study gives us pause to reflect. As we approach the festive season, we would do well to remember one thing. Social media certainly affords us unprecedented opportunities for contact with friends from whom we are unavoidably separated by distance. But the process of engaging with these media can become so habit forming that we unwittingly neglect friends, loved ones and neighbours who are physically within our reach.

Limiting our use of social media may be the best gift we can offer our children, parents, friends and neighbours this Christmas.