Social media expert: ‘It’s never been easier to run away from ourselves’

Exeter wants to make sure its students know how much time can be wasted on social media and their mobile devices, so it brought to campus a person whose job it was to waste it.

Max Stossel once ran social media for multi-national brands. He later worked for a social media company where he designed notifications to distract people. Today, Stossel is the founder of Social Awakening, an organization whose aim is to help “teens, schools, and parents survive and thrive in this digital world.”

Stossel took to the stage in Assembly Hall last week to talk about social media’s impact on our lives and how we can make better decisions about how much and how frequently we want to use it.

“Have you ever looked down at your phones or computers and immediately gotten distracted, forgotten what the heck you were doing?” Stossel asked his audience. “Give me honest hands, please. Honest hands, please. That’s most of us and some liars.

“That was my job. I was designing notifications on your phones to take you out of your world and bring you into mine because I was working for a social media company. Social media companies make their money on advertising, which basically means the more of your time that we can take, the more money we make.”

A 2023 Gallup poll found that the average U.S. teen spends more than four hours a day on social media. That use spikes to 5.3 hours a day among girls ages 13-17. Add that to all their other screen time in a day, and the average American teen is on a screen more than seven hours daily. Stossel says that’s easy to believe, given the convenience our devices offer.

“I personally have no idea where I’m going if my blue dot is not lined up on the map,” he said. “I’m grateful for that one. We have a camera, a stopwatch, a calculator, a flashlight and every song that’s ever been invented in our pockets. That is magic. We have these magical devices in our pockets.

“So how, with these magical devices, are we also seeing such an increase in stress, anxiety, depression, chaos, conflict? How can something so awesome also be making such a mess?”

Technological advances and worries about their impact on society are not new to the American experience. Cable TV, explicit song lyrics, violent video games — all have taken their turn in the spotlight as societal ills. But Stossel and Social Awakening contend that the things that separate social media’s impact from the others are accessibility and ubiquity.

“The hardest part about growing up in the digital world right now is that it’s never been easier to run away from ourselves,” he said. “The moment things get a little bit awkward, we walk into a room, dunno who to talk to, we got the safety blanket right there or just like, ah, I’m uncomfortable. I dunno what I’m doing. I’ve got the safety blanket right here. If you think about anything in your life that you’re proud of yourself for was probably something hard you worked through, got to the other side of, that’s where a lot of meaning comes from, but we’re running away from every little challenge, every little boredom, every little anxiety, every little everything.”

A particularly diabolical feature of social media is Stossel’s old specialty: Notifications. It’s not enough that social media titans like Instagram, YouTube, SnapChat are omnipresent. They also dangle bait.

“‘Hey, someone just took a picture of you or said something about you to everybody. Would you like to know what they said?’” How do we not click on that, Stossel asks.

“Every time we hit one of those little red icons, we’re playing the slot machine of what did I get? What did I get this time? Sometimes we got the exciting things, sometimes we didn’t. Did I get a lot of likes? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Did the one person I really wanted to see my story, did they see my story? Sometimes they did, sometimes they didn’t. And then we keep checking and checking and checking.”

Simple and seemingly useful information like telling someone their text has been “read” or a fellow Instagrammer was “online 20 minutes” ago can turn into their own accelerant for anti-social behavior. “You left me on read for an hour? Well, let’s see how you like it.” Or … “Wait, you were online 20 minutes ago? Why didn’t you respond to me.” None of this information winds up being all that helpful to healthy relationships.

Stossel acknowledges that not all social media is bad. There are funny things, inspiring things, educational things. “Yeah, there’s lots of great stuff out there on the internet, but I want to point out that all the things we actually love about social media, they are the reward in the slot machine. Our lived experience using this stuff becomes ‘bored, bored, bored — Whoa, check that out. Bored, bored, bored, bored, bored. Oh, that’s funny. We get this emotional hit every once in a while, which serves to keep us scrolling.”

Stossel challenged the students as they sat in Assembly Hall to delete a favorite app from their phones for a week. He told them that the immediate addiction of thumb-tapping the empty space on their phone would eventually subside and predicted that by the end of the week, many of them would find they either didn’t miss the app all that much or missed only an element of interacting with it.

Just knowing the parts that are missed to the parts that are not is helpful, Stossel said. “Also, figuring out what we’re going to do instead. If it’s like ‘I did it, I deleted Instagram Reels,’ then I go on TikTok, that is basically the same thing. But figuring out what do we actually want to do instead that feels better is a really helpful way of navigating this.”