When Brooke Williams gave up most social media after she started college, she lost multiple friends.
The 22-year-old recent Kent State University graduate, who also recently traded her smartphone for a flip phone, said the feeling of being offline was incredibly alienating. That is, until she realized where her real connections came from: a handful of friends with whom she has grown especially close.
“It was very freeing to be like, ‘Oh, I have my people, they have me, I don’t feel stretched thin,’” Williams said. “I feel connected, and I feel loved in a way that I don’t love this person I sat next to in biology my freshman year of college.”
In today’s digital world, relationships often depend on connections built or maintained through social media. As more young people reduce screen time on their smartphones, those who spend less time on social platforms may lose access to online friends, prioritize in-person relationships or seek fresh forms of connection.
Go deeper: Read more about young people going lo tech, including leaving their smartphones behind.
The feeling of connection people get from social media is insincere, said Eric Sotnak, a University of Akron philosophy professor who teaches digital ethics. Depending on social media too heavily for connection may not be fruitful — but it is possible to escape the platforms.
Jessica Greene has also made an effort to disconnect from social media because she doesn’t want to rely on technology to live her life. The 21-year-old psychology student at the University of Akron said many of her past friendships relied heavily on social media.
When friendships faded because she wasn’t interacting with those people through social media anymore, she said she felt better — like they were holding her back.
“When you disconnect from that, and that’s the only thing that’s really holding the friendship together, it kind of just swoops away,” Greene said.
Appstinence founder suggests leaving social media gradually
Gabriela Nguyen, founder of Appstinence, said she spent 10 years chronically online and several hours per day jumping between social platforms. Much of her sense of self came from the identity she had on those social platforms, said Nguyen, who is in her mid-20s and lives in Silicon Valley.
She said she tried all sorts of solutions to escape her phone’s addictiveness over the years: digital detoxes, mindfulness practices and more. But nothing seemed to stick.
“We are at a breaking point with it,” Nguyen said. “There’s nothing that feels peaceful and in balance about having to have an increasingly longer list of techniques and practices and apps to mitigate the use that I would have of social media. … You just feel like you’re just running away.”
Appstinence, a free service, is geared toward helping people who feel stuck on their phones but are either scared to deal with the repercussions of leaving social media or worried about what to do with their newfound free time.
She said leaving social media isn’t just deleting the apps — it’s a process. She created a five-step guide to quitting that involves decreasing use and deactivating accounts one by one.
“In addition to it being psychologically addictive, it’s also a dependency you have socially,” she said.
Social media dependency isn’t always bad, though, said Amber Ferris, director of the University of Akron’s School of Communication. The issue stems from what people are using social platforms for, not necessarily from the platforms themselves or how much time somebody spends on them.
The line crosses from dependency to addiction when it harms someone’s life, Ferris said.
Kent State grad has stronger relationships without social media
Williams said it felt freeing to get rid of social media. She let friends know ahead of time that she was deleting the platforms and told them to text her to stay in touch.
“Almost no one texted me,” said Williams, who switched to her flip phone in March. “And then I just let it all go, and I haven’t had it since. … I really don’t miss any of it. … The people I care about, I will call, or I will text.”
Because she had more time without the pull of social media, Williams said she dedicated more energy to people she is close with, and those who care about her also became more present in her life.
Though she still has a Facebook account to connect with family she doesn’t normally see, she only posts once per year.
Nguyen suggested that instead of just running away from social media, people find something to run toward.
For Williams, that was caring for and spending more time as the real-life version of herself — not the one she was curating online.
Now, she is more compelled to spend time with people rather than sending videos back and forth on social media.
“I don’t think any of the social connections that I made by posting anything to a public forum actually did anything for me,” she said.
Lauren Cohen is a community reporting intern for the Akron Beacon Journal and Signal Akron. The position is funded through a grant from the Knight Foundation, which is a funder of Signal Akron.
