Caught In The Web

Do your social media feeds leave you hungry for more? Sharon Stephenson talks to two New Zealand women who reclaimed their time from tech addiction – and tells how you can too

Have you heard the one about the woman who was so addicted to Instagram she didn’t notice her eight-month-old baby had fallen down the stairs? It’s actually no joke: this horrifying accident happened last year to a London mother of two, who admitted to UK media she was mindlessly scrolling through her phone and “sucked into the Instagram vacuum” when her baby crawled onto the landing.

“I heard a thud, then a cry,” said the 34-year-old. “Transfixed by my phone, my brain took a couple of seconds to realise that she’d tumbled down the stairs. I hadn’t even noticed she was out of sight.”

Fortunately, the baby was fine, her fall broken by the steps. However, the woman was not. “I was riddled with guilt,” she said. “I could have hurt or killed my child, and for what? For some meaningless nonsense on social media.”

As anyone with even rudimentary knowledge of social media knows, it’s easy to get sucked into a vortex of holiday snaps, cute puppies and whatever the heck that person you met once years ago is having for breakfast. Especially when it’s so

ubiquitous: figures show that around three billion people, or 40% of the world’s population, use online social media, spending a couple of hours every day sharing, liking and tweeting on these platforms. Here in New Zealand, it’s estimated around 3.5 million of us, or 74% of the population, are social media users.

SOUNDS LIKE FUN?

In his 2017 book Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked, psychologist Adam Alter suggests 88% of us can be classified as ‘overusers’, meaning we spend more than an hour each day on our phones. He says some of us spend more time on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat than any other daily activity, apart from sleeping.