This article explains why I only spent less than 1 hour on social media each week to inspire you to reflect on intention with social media.
In this article, I am going to break down and share:
(i) a story about chewing gum that hopefully inspires readers to reflect upon the source of information
(ii) 3 key barriers to “learning” from social media — I summarised them into 3 No-s
(iii) reflection on the time spent on social media from the angle of an investor (to examine the rate of return)
Get the Full system: learning how to learn in a way that makes money
Part 1:
There was a story about chewing gum.
Long time ago, there was a general who just won a war, he handed a chewing gum to one of his soldiers who took it and thanked the general. As he chewed the gum, he could not feel any sweetness so he asked the general “why, general, would you chew a sugarless gum?”
The general replied “this is not a sugarless gum, it is a gum that I chewed.”
*** just a story
Before you think that the general is gross and disgusting to give his chewed gum to the soldier, this is what happened in the era of information overwhelm.
When we log onto social media, it is full of “chewed” information. Most information there are not even second hand or third hand, but N-th hand. Many of us have been told to find inspiration on social media when creating content (that we can just copy and modify what others have created to get similar result from the algorithm), hence you can find a lot of similar information on social media. Many of the content there are not personal experience sharing, experiment study, nor research. They are just bits and pieces of information flowing in the sea with the purpose to excite, arouse emotion, grab your next second attention.
There is not much sweetness or nutrients in those information, yet we spend hours and hours on consuming these content. We may think that we have learnt a lot — since the content was broken down into digestible bit-size piece, in our perception that could improve “digestion” of the information and make it easier to understand and absorb right?
The contrary is true. there are 3 key barriers to “learning” from social media — I summarised these 3 barriers into 3 No s.
Part 2: 3 key barriers to “learning” from social media
(a) No memory
because the information is so scattered and piecemeal, it becomes very hard, if not impossible, to remember. After 1 hour on social media, if I ask you “what is the 3 things that you learn?” Would you be able to answer that?
Without memory of the information, even if some of the information may help us in solving problems in life or at work or in relationships, we could not recall it and therefore it is of no help or use to us.
(b) Nowhere to be found
Even if we can’t memorise the content, another indicator as to whether the content would be useful to us is whether we can find it when we need it.
I don’t necessarily remember what is Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, but as long as I know that there is a need hierarchy about human, I can google search it and find it in a second. That is a knowledge that is under my control.
Versus social media content, the difficulty is #1 we don’t remember what we have seen at all (point a above) #2 we may have a vague idea but the problem is social media is not search engine, it is very hard to find the exact same post that we have scrolled past. Hence it is hard for us to find the information when needed, making it hard to be applicable.
Practically, there maybe ways to find a previous post that we have looked at, but that would require we need to look back at the history of our viewings, that could take another hour to find a particular post or content — not that practical.
© No intention
When the information comes to us on social media, we don’t get to choose what we want to look at — the algorithm of the social media platform decides that for us, based on what it thinks would be of interest to us. The goal of the algorithm is to keep us staying on the platform for as long as possible.
That put us into a passive role in accepting information. Even if we can scroll past the content within 1–3 seconds, we would need to screen it to decide that we are not interested in it before scrolling. The usual rule of thumb is whether the content can excite or interest us in the first few seconds.
Unfortunately, the information we need that could help us to breakthrough and grow could be less exciting and less interesting — what we are not interested in could be just the information we need!
When we learn without intention, we do not know what we are looking for, hence this approach significantly lower our efficiency and effectiveness of learning.
Intentional learning is how we can achieve fast growth within a short period of time — many people want that, but they are doing exactly the opposite — looking for source of information on social media passively and having no idea to decide what information they need, leaving everything to chances. And we all know how chances work in life — chances are gambling, and the gamblers would lose to the casino with only a few super lucky exceptions.
Part 3: The rate of return on making the time investment on social media
Some may argue that “the purpose of social media is not to learn, it is for social connection. Therefore it makes sense that we cannot learn from social media content.”
I agree, and I have more to add to that:
(1) social media 1.0 could be established for social connection and entertainment, but social media 2.0 is for business. And social media 3.0 is for everything — connection, entertainment, business, shopping, learning, inspiration, opportunities, news, content, events etc. Numerous education companies and tutors, coaches, educators have been using social media as a platform to showcase expertise, the process of which will involve teaching (and learning for their audience).
(2) we are spending most of our spare times on social media. And given that the nature of human is to grow and develop oneself, even if we are not actively looking for learning opportunities, what we naturally look for is “what we can get out of this piece of social media content”. In essence, that is learning.
For example, if you are looking at a reels on how to make a chocolate brownie, you are learning about how to make that chocolate brownie.
If you are looking at someone’s life in a day, you are learning what it is like to be a [occupation] or what it is like living in [place].
If you are looking at a dog post, you are learning about the type of dog or how to take care of a dog or where can I take my dog for a walk.
There must be something that you are learning from the content which is what attracted you to it at the first place (that you stopped scrolling).
Time is a limited resources in our life — so is money.
Yet often times we invest our money much more carefully than we invest our time. If we invest our time with the mindset of an investor (i.e. looking at the rate of return), then investing time on social media would be an unwise investment. Since the time value of investment is alike to $100,000 and the return that we get from social media may only be entertainment, which is alike to $10. Is this still worth investing so much of your time on as a content consumer?
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