Disconnected

Topics such as #FacebookDown immediately became trending on X (I will still insist on calling it Twitter), with one big question in everybody's minds: what are we going to do now?

Where will we get our latest fodder of news, tsismis, and a glimpse of how everyone’s going through their lives?

Fortunately, the outage lasted for only about half an hour or so, and everybody was able to log back into their accounts with no apparent security risk.

But that brief moment of outage of one of the world's most prominent social media sites has had me wondering at around two in the morning: with social media now becoming a part and parcel of our daily lives, is it still possible for us to get ourselves “disconnected”?

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Some analysts have likened our dependence on social media to drug addiction – and withdrawing from social media can put the user through the same difficulties those battling drug addiction have gone through.

I know some people who have tried to put themselves “off the grid” by deactivating their social media accounts or, at the very least, limiting their time on screen. Some succeed, but with great difficulty; others still find themselves going back to scrolling through their Facebook or Instagram feeds from time to time, just to update themselves with the world and with their friends.

The trouble is, that social media platforms have become such a pervasive part of our lives that we’ve absorbed them into our workplaces, our homes, and even into what we may consider our private spaces.

Come to think of it: ten years ago, when I first started at OpinYon, almost all inter-office communication was done by e-mail. SMS text messaging, though clearly on the way out, is still the primary way to communicate.

Work stops when we go home, and anyway, since almost everything – from writeups to layouts – is done inside the office, we rarely complain about the long hours we put in (I remember going home at around midnight every Thursday when the tallboy edition of OpinYon goes to print).

Fast forward ten years, and we’ve found ourselves so dependent on social media sites just to get the work done. Facebook is now one of our primary sources of information. We use Messenger not only for inter-office communication but also for sharing photos and files. E-mail, while still a primary way of sending articles and photos, isn’t used as much as we’d done so in the past.

And so just like that Wednesday midnight when we find ourselves locked out of social media, we feel like a big part of our lives has been taken away, at least for the moment.

Which makes me wonder: how will we, as the human race, cope with what some believe will be the demise of social media?

#WeTakeAStand #OpinYon #JamesVelosoColumn #UnCommonSense #Disconnected #FacebookDown