Spoon for soup: How Social Media Forces Us to Eat by The Rules

Social media is present in our lives as an indispensable part of existence. Social media is our soup spoon. We can eat soup with a fork, with chopsticks, with our hands, or drink the broth straight from the bowl like water — and as a result, we either get messy or spend far too much time eating. A soup spoon lets us enjoy the meal calmly, without fear of soiling ourselves or our clothes. But is that really true? A small child can still get messy even with a spoon.

Once upon a time, we were those children — trying to hold the spoon correctly, making progress day by day, immersing ourselves in the world of social media. We carefully set up our profiles, uploaded photos, added and changed hashtags, added and removed geotags, opened and closed our accounts. Now it’s all routine for us. Every day, opening one app or another, we do it on autopilot. We read posts, look at pictures, observe and interpret people’s actions, dive into other people’s lives, and put our own on display.

In 1971, the first email was sent. The first chance for one person to reach another. The laying of a “textual highway” through the air. 1995 — the emergence of one of the first social networks for finding people. 1997 — the arrival of the most complete prototype of the modern social network: personal profiles, friend lists, messaging, interest groups. Why did that first prototype burn out on the World Wide Web? Slow internet, not everyone had computers or smartphones, and not everyone was ready to share their private life. In other words, it lacked critical mass.

Not much time has passed since then — twenty-five years, give or take. What do we see now? Almost everyone has either a smartphone, a computer, or both, plus high-speed internet. In our pocket, in our backpack, in our bag, we carry people from anywhere on the planet — but besides those people, we carry our entire life in our pocket. We spend time watching other people’s lives, diving into them, and sharing our own. Are we competing? Are we trying to make our own lives brighter by observing them through the prism of photos and posts? Do we wait for a vacation just to rest — or to post a picture of dolphins or a brilliant flash of sunset on the sea? Do we still see the whole picture of life as it is, or do we see nature, people, and ourselves through the camera’s eye that stares back at us every single day? Unfortunately, for many — yes. Of course, not everyone is so strict and so attached to social media, but for the majority, a social network is a soup spoon.

Why are we so afraid of getting messy? What would happen if we tried to eat our soup not with a spoon, but with chopsticks or a fork? Have you ever scrolled through your feed, scared to miss a trend? Or liked a photo that actually annoyed you? That's our "spoon" – convenient, but the only one we`ve got. What if someone saw and said, “Is he crazy? There’s a spoon right there!” A spoon can break, get lost, be stolen. And here is what would truly be strange and abnormal: to starve to death in front of a bowl full of food. The soup is there. Only you no longer know how to eat it. Social media is a clever trap for our minds, but to avoid falling into it, you just need to stop and think.