It’s easy to dream of the offline days. The desire to stop passively scrolling precious time away has resulted in school districts banning cell phones, a recent uptick in flip phone sales and viral hashtags about temporarily giving up Instagram for Lent.
The reasons to impulsively delete your internet presence are numerous. Maybe you’re tired of the algorithm spoon-feeding you your worldview and opinions. Maybe your screen time outweighs the time spent with family and friends. Maybe the constant ad-targeting, FOMO and blue light headaches are finally too much — you decide the doom-scrolling days are over.
However, is it even feasible to fully log off social media today? Or have we become too fundamentally tethered to these platforms’ social dynamics? TikTok, Instagram and X have become integral sources of culture, ranging from politics to fashion trends to new vocabulary. Is being chronically online a requirement to stay in the loop?
Toshi Smith, a senior studying business administration, said Instagram was so addictive that he had to take a break. “When I did delete the app, it was an unconscious thing, but I would find myself looking for it [on my phone] and having a moment.”
Smith eventually caved and redownloaded Instagram. “I tried those timers and app limiters but I don’t listen to them and am always tapping ‘five more minutes’ and then ‘ignore,’” Smith said.
Science backs this feeling of craving social media’s instant gratification content. Professor Rita Barakat, who teaches cellular and molecular neuroscience at USC, says social media impacts regions of the brain involved in emotion, motivation, and reward.
“There is likely to be an acute increase in dopamine release in specific parts of the brain that underlie the formation of habits, most notably the ventral basal ganglia,” Barakat said. This region of the brain is a fundamental component deep within the cerebrum. “Interestingly, dopamine is more closely associated with the anticipation of a reward, rather than the actual reward itself.”
So with every opening of a social media app and the dopamine spike anticipating the next viral video, the release weakens after actually engaging, encouraging prolonged scrolling. “It’s possible that one might develop a tolerance to a certain level of social media usage that could lead to increased use over time to reproduce the same dopamine effect,” Barakat said.
Barakat mentions how recent studies show that social media can cause structural and functional changes throughout the brain and in the orbitofrontal and prefrontal cortices, similar to types of addiction.
Lauren Woolley, a senior studying public relations & advertising, expressed her frustration with social media forcing her to compare herself with thousands of different people.
“I think a lot of trend cycles are quicker online, we’re seeing trends go in and out so fast with what you should look like,” Woolley said. “It’s so easily accessible, versus magazines growing up, where you had unrealistic beauty standards to achieve. But it wasn’t on my phone in my pocket 24/7.”
Woolley then presented another dilemma: if she deleted social media, she’d feel left out of conversations. In her defense, how many times a day do you hear your friends say, “I saw a Tiktok where…” or “they posted on Instagram that…?” Social media references and “brainrot” seem to dominate modern conversation. Is there some sort of Bechdel test for catchy online jargon?
According to an article in The New Yorker about the extremely offline author downloading TikTok, he was instantly submerged in a vocabulary he couldn’t understand. His main conclusion was that the app is a “form of concentrated escapism marketed to a weary generation that is only now reaching adulthood.”
Not only does social media permeate our daily conversations, it can bleed into professional decisions as well.
A recent video of actress Maya Hawke went viral as she discusses how Instagram followers impact movie casting. “It’s like, ‘I don’t care about Instagram, Instagram sucks!’” Hawke said. “Right, but just so you know, if you have over this many followers, you can get the movie funded.”
Even Jesse Eisenberg, who played Facebook-founder Mark Zuckerberg himself in the 2010 critically-acclaimed film “The Social Network,” spoke about not having social media. He told the Smartless Podcast this past January that he was suspicious of it and that “the movie depicts this person creating it who does not have what I would consider kind of healthy social relationships. And so if this product is the extension of this person’s social behavior, then this is not great.”
Beyond Hollywood, social media has infiltrated careers with the rise of influencers, content creators and online businesses, making it harder to get offline. However, even people whose jobs rely on social media desire to get off it.
Influencer Victoria Vesce told Forbes last year that “social media can be overwhelming, with the pressure to constantly post and stay relevant” and that she has to take multiple breaks for her well-being. She takes intentional hiatuses to manage her well-being.
One of the most exhausting aspects of the internet for content creators is that virality dangles like money on a string. With just one more video, one more trend, your life can change overnight and land you on the red carpet like Brittany Broski.
Jackie Michelle, co-director of outreach for USC REACH student social media organization, has also had to take breaks from social media, especially to stay on top of her academics. However, there’s a drawback. “I would say the thing I miss the most [when off social media] is definitely my engagement goes down a lot,” says Michelle. “So when I’m posting consistently, I feel like my videos will get a good amount and I’ll be gaining followers consistently. But then when I stop posting, my followers will drop a lot.”
Another Forbes article discusses the recent TikTok blackout as a “wakeup call” for influencers and social media-based businesses. This begs the same question: is it possible to untangle all the cords?
Many people feel their career’s success is entrenched in social media. This fear has been cemented for years, an old New York Times article from 2016 even claiming deleting social media can ruin your career.
Although social media has vastly changed in the past decade, the fear still continues. For example, LinkedIn has gradually become eerily similar to social media, with users posting personal life updates rather than just career developments.
Sean Smith, a freshman studying computer science, has a LinkedIn account but doesn’t post on it. “It’s very interesting because it’s a market that, job-wise, does affect me. Because social media is pretty lucrative,” Smith said.
Smith went on to mention how he gets a lot of news from social media. “This might be my fault, but I don’t really read or watch the news much, so I’d say a good portion comes from Twitter, Instagram, etc,” he said. “That naturally will shape your views. It’s accessible, but there’s a lot of bias and toxicity. You can go down some weird rabbit holes pretty easily. Stuff like that is dangerous.”
When it comes to news and politics, social media reduces everything to bites of content that need to be consumed. Does social media actually spread helpful, important information? Or does it blur the lines between what is newsworthy and what is viral, desensitizing the public to digital bytes of clickable headlines?
Barakat discusses how social media platforms can leverage emotional responses: “Norepinephrine production can increase in response to the presentation of highly salient, or relevant stimuli.” This surge in the “fight or flight” neurotransmitter taps into the brain’s sub-cortex,” Barakat said. Basically, a scientifically-sound description of the brain’s response to social media’s widespread “rage-bait” online.
Professor Elisa Warford, who teaches Ethical Issues in Artificial Intelligence at USC, references how leaked Facebook research “showed they had ‘compelling evidence that our core product mechanics, such as virality, recommendations, and optimizing for engagement are a significant part of why [hate speech and misinformation] flourish on the platform.’”
With this influx of personalized content, polarizing algorithmic echo-chambers can arise on social media. “Studies have shown that when groups interact only with like minded individuals, their views harden and become more extreme,” Warford said. “Also, it’s the extreme views we hear the most because they’re the ones posting the most content.”
But if you delete social media to get away, is it still possible to participate in this generation’s discourse – be it political, cultural, social, etc. – with it all streaming from online?
“It’s likely not a coincidence that as social media use has on the whole continued to rise globally, so too have the widespread reports of loneliness that necessitated the former U.S. Surgeon General to declare a health emergency surrounding loneliness,” Barakat said. She mentions how superficiality online increases the difficulty of forming genuine relationships.
With all of this information and discourse about social media, it’s easy to get swept up in it all. After all, in a city like Los Angeles, everything is Instagrammable…even the nonchalant photo dumps meticulously curated to seem low effort.
However, though your posts can tag hundreds of friends, social media is only a highlights reel of life’s best moments. I’ve found the easiest way to distance myself from the stress of social media is to reframe my idea of it. Not everything has to be documented, captured, consumed, posted or perceived.
While there’s nothing wrong with being active online, a balance is necessary. We need to remind ourselves once and a while that it’s possible to unplug and social media is not as integral to our livelihoods as we may believe.