Give yourself the gift of social media down-time!

In the process of exposing us to so many new people, social media also reveals how many interesting individuals we could know but don’t.

Again, this sets us up to feel that we’re somehow falling short, especially if our online “friends” seem always to have more followers than we do.

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.

Finally, let’s consider the growing body of evidence for increased 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 per cent 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 via the internet. This 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 studies mentioned here - and many others across the world - ought to give 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. Yet 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. It’s certainly a great gift to our own mental health.