Caroline O'Donoghue: 'There is no way to leave a WhatsApp group without upsetting everyone in it'
A few years ago, when I was still a proper journalist, I was asked to do a piece on ‘digital detoxing’. It was amid headlines about how the average adult person checks their phone 70,000 times a day, or something, and there were many studies about social media’s links to mental illness and depression. All of this information, which was faintly surprising then, is now considered so obvious that to point it out in normal conversation would make you a crashing bore. Yes, we know that the phones are killing us. We know they’re eroding our concentration, our self-esteem, our ability to appreciate the physicality of life. And most of us have, in some ways, tried to correct that behaviour. We turn notifications off, we delete social media apps, we turn down the screen brightness.
The phone hygiene movement makes sense, but it has always annoyed me a little, mostly because I think it focuses on the wrong things. I’ll admit, I have a bias here. I have an active social media presence on Instagram and Twitter, something that is partly to do with my career path and its reliance on social media for publicity, and partly to do with my personality. I like shooting things out into space, sometimes. I work long days, and I have no colleagues, and sometimes when I’m boiling the kettle I’ll take a selfie or tweet my theories on t.A.T.u's first album. For me, it takes the place of water cooler conversation.
