What does a healthy relationship with social media look like?
It depends who you ask.
For some younger people, it’s finding balance between online communities and offline communities.
That included removing theInstagram appfrom her home screen but not completely off her phone.
None of it helped.
Poteryakhin continues to use the platforms, undeterred by the barriers she’s built.
Poteryakhin isn’t the only one.
To log off or not to log off?
The simplest suggestion, in theory, is to go cold turkey.
Give up all social media and build a life apart from our devices and online identities.
In practice, separating our online self from our IRL self is a difficult feat.
Ankit Dhame received his first phone, a Samsung flip phone, when he was in seventh grade.
“From the beginning, I always made connections [on the internet].
At its worst, Dhame said, his screen time has exceeded 12 hours a day.
“That’s like cutting off your hands because you want to quit smoking,” Dhame said.
“That’s not a solution.”
Masha Breeze, 21, is the owner of an Instagram meme account called @senilewaif.
Soon, the small following of @senilewaif grew into a robust community of trans people.
Jenny Odell refers to this as “standing apart.”
It means not fleeing your enemy, but knowing your enemy,” she writes.
They’re now finding a way to coexist with the technologies and platforms they rely on.
“There’s this binary of being on social media and being in real life,” Breeze said.
“But they’re both real life, there’s no such thing as not real life.”
This could make it even harder to separate from social platforms.
Research has shownthat people tend to be happier and healthier when they spend less time on social media.
When social media is used as a supplement to an already-existing community, it can be beneficial.
When it’s used as a substitute for community, that’s when people run into trouble.
“In the end, my phone is boring now,” she said.
