Social media, time and intention

or how procrastination doesn't make us happy

Feb 12, 2021

Hi! Welcome to another edition of the Internet in a Telegram, a newsletter about mediums and messages by Nevoazul magazine. This is our way of sharing with you what we discover when we are online. Thank you for subscribing!

In this newsletter, we write about:

How social media is a mood management problem
Having a moral obligation to be on TikTok
Creeping as a Service
…and much more!

In the mood for social media

Almost every week, there's a new app promising to keep us away from social media. Some of them use passwords to lock us out of the digital ecosystem. Others use games, digital trees or countdown watches to distract us. Methodologies aside, the message is always the same: the time to be on social media is over.

This obsession with counting the minutes spent on Instagram, Facebook or Twitter, emerged as an attempt to get our attention back. Still, for Tim Pychyl, a member of The Procrastination Research Group, these apps are rarely the solution. "Procrastination is not a time-management problem; it's an emotion-management problem", justifies Pychyl. Adding that "procrastination is, by definition, an irrational behaviour, because it runs counter to our own idea of what will make us happy”.

The same can be said about the hours we spent scrolling on social media. Time control can soften the habit, but we need purpose and intention to have a meaningful relationship with our feeds. One trick is to combine time with actions. For every five minutes spent on Twitter, interact directly with someone on that social network. For each ad in the Instagram feed, remember the reason why you are there. It's a delicate tension that can help us balance our role as users and our intentions as people.

5 articles about social media and identity

Our Shared Unsharing | Instagram could not handle 2020 either
On online | Thinking about what other people think
Who Would I Be Without Instagram? | A history of Instagram in four acts
Do I Have a Moral Obligation to Be On TikTok? | Am I too old?
Creeping as a Service (CraaS) | About our obsession with identity

Can social media expand your creativity?

Do you find value on Instagram or Twitter?
When online, are you an observer or a creator?

Join the discussion and share with us links, thoughts, podcasts, or articles relevant to this topic. Let's turn this newsletter’s section into a safe place for curious minds.

…and also, we would love to know who is behind this screen :)

Want to know more about Nevoazul? Here's a quick recap :) Nevoazul is an annual magazine about how we communicate on and off the Internet. In our team, we have Inês Catarina Pinto, Bárbara Nogueira, Pedro Codeço, Isabel Sá, Pedro Oliveira, and Miguel Barbot. We are based in Porto, but you can find our magazine in cool kiosks around the world. As one of our subscribers, you have 30% off when buying any edition of the magazine. Just use the code #telegrama at checkout.

The Internet in a Telegram