If you say you’ve never been “ghosted” on social media, you’re lying. It’s when response times grow longer, content gets drier, and ultimately all communication comes to a halt. We have all been both the perpetrators and victims of ghosting in some form or another, and the minute we start to normalize the act of ceasing communication with a close friend or romantic partner, maybe it will stop occurring on both ends.
I’ll be the first to admit that I would liberally use ghosting as a technique to avoid my vexations with people. The minute I began to feel even slightly annoyed with someone, or could sense the beginning stages of conflict, I would refrain from any deep engagements in conversation and even avoid responding to texts and Snapchats. Social media and the silent culture it manifests allowed me to avoid any confrontation.
Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, and iMessage allow people in different spaces to communicate with each other as if they were together. Yet the convenience and expediency of virtual communication has detrimental effects. Since we aren’t required to put in much effort in a virtual conversation, our ability to converse has declined as well.
Without being able to truly experience a conversation with another individual, our communication abilities suffer. The full impact of our words, whether positive or negative, aren’t always understood on a screen. We tend to inaccurately gauge how the words we choose affect others, and thus fail to choose correctly. By the same token, it’s difficult to accurately decipher what others are saying. Tones of voice, expression, and purpose are all lost through texting or through the use of social media to communicate, and we are only left with the residual words or images to speculate the extent of what we really mean.
“Without being able to truly experience a conversation with another individual, our communication abilities suffer.”
This large potential for error also distorts people’s social media profiles. There is virtually no pressure to get to know one another for our authentic values, fears, or identities when we can present ourselves as anyone we want. Actions like “ghosting” other people or hiding under the blanket of virtual invisibility become more apparent as the repercussions of practically cutting others out of our lives disappear as well.
In October, a combination of internal studies and documents divulged by Facebook researchers proved that many self-harming aspects of today’s society, including trends of increased depression, eating-disorders, and even genocide, can be traced to Facebook and Instagram and the dangerous ease at which inaccurate content can reach mass populations.
Facebook and Instagram favored elites, wounded teenagers’ mental health, and avoided solving human and sex trafficking, explained the reporter of the “The Facebook Files” Jeff Horowitz, who spoke at the John F. Kennedy Junior Forum this past month. “Tik Tok tends to be for comedic and talent performances; Snapchat is more for direct communication, and Instagram is just all about the body,” he said.
The core issue with these apps, Horowitz argued, is that constant exposure to the most popular content leads users to make negative comparisons to their own lives. Facebook, well-aware of its plague on society’s general sanity, only made efforts to resolve this issue once Apple threatened to remove both Facebook and Instagram from the App Store. As Horowitz suggested, these large corporations aren’t looking out for the millions of customers they reach each day. They really only care about themselves, and how to further lure their users’ addiction.
Social media is convenient. It’s fun, exciting, and constantly stimulating, but it’s arguably the biggest crutch our generation will have to face in the challenge to understand each other. If we keep “ghosting” each other whenever we suspect discomfort, or curate social media profiles and appearances to represent something we’re not, the value of human connection will not only rely on false pretenses, but will also fail to save us if and when technology cannot.
Marbella Marlo ’24 (mmarlo@college.harvard.edu) leaves read-receipts on iMessage.