As I mentioned on last week’s Best of the Week, life in the modern world is a constant bombardment of information. Part of this is intellectual information like news stories, books, or if you’re still in education, lessons- things which are good for you but can be nonetheless hard to remember. But another aspect of information bombardment is social information, constantly and efficiently delivered to us via a myriad of electronic devices.

As a society, we convince ourselves that we need to be constantly informed of our friends’ various activities. If an associate has been on holiday, entered into a new relationship or passed their driving test, we must know as soon as possible. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with mild curiosity. The problem arises when we spend inordinate amounts of time being concerned about the lives of others, when we really ought to be principally concerned with those immediately around us, not the hundreds of people we see online.

One of the problems of social media is that is misrepresents what people’s lives are really like. You generally only see the good aspects of life: weddings, parties, the birth of a new child, graduation ceremonies. The other parts of life- funerals, divorces, the ending of friendships- are seldom prominently displayed online. This gives the impression that your friends are all having wonderful lives, which may make you feel more inadequate about your own. It’s no surprise that social media has contributed to people feeling increasingly depressed and insecure. In some extreme cases, girls will have a radical makeover in order to make their online pictures prettier. More common is the feeling that if your posts did not get as many positive reactions as the posts of your friends, you are unpopular or a social outcast.

Social media can thus often regress into a crude popularity contest. Although there is no explicit competition, people feel the need to increase their online presence. At school, some people would try to add as many friends onto their Facebook profile as possible, even if they barely knew the people they were adding. As with all competitions, there are winners and losers. The winners will get a temporary happiness, believing that their relatively high online status means they are a better person. But such happiness is fleeting. Partly because the desire for a greater following is largely insatiable. All of a sudden, having 200 followers on Instagram isn’t enough, you have to have 300. For the most part, there is no end point where people are satisfied with the degree to which their online activity is felt.

However, for the losers from the social media competition, the whole affair  often makes them miserable. Like the winners, they may also spend large amounts of time on social media. The difference is that there is no reward for them. Their social media activities feel more like chores than a form of entertainment. A classic example is journalists, who nowadays are more or less required to be on Twitter. They may post links to the fantastic journalism they write on Twitter, only to be disheartened when their following pales in comparison to a superfluous celebrity or model.

That is my biggest problem with social media. It largely rewards those who ought not to be rewarded, and ignores those whose work ought to be given greater recognition. Celebrity gossip and the private lives of the rich and famous get a vast amount of attention. Meanwhile, the plight of the world’s most vulnerable goes largely ignored, except for perhaps some left wing activist saying how much they care. Meaningful, insightful and unique analysis of the world we live in is scarce. There is hardly any attention paid to science, even as science has done so much to improve our lives. Academic figures, researchers and analysts are cast aside, perhaps because their work is seen as stuffy, dull, or incomprehensible. Instead, talentless musicians, pointless famous figures and idiotic politicians (Trump, Boris Johnson) steal the limelight. Bellicose nonsense fills the social media news feeds, while the real issues remain unknown.

Perhaps this isn’t the fault of social media, which after all, is only a tool with no agency of its own. At the end of the day, social media is only a reflection of how broken our society has become. It reflects our obsession with image, particularly the image of women- one of the biggest manifestations of misogyny of our age. It shows how wilfully ignorant we all are, preferring idle gossip to truly relevant information. Often the anonymity of social media shows the brutal side of human nature, with cyber-bullying, ‘trolling’ and violently prejudice views presenting themselves all too often. It is far easier to make a racist remark behind the safety of a computer screen, than to be racist to a person’s face.

I think the only solution to all this is to decrease the prominence social media enjoys in the modern world.  The stigma against the non-use of social media must end. Especially for young people, no one should be described as ‘weird’ or even ‘different’ for not being on a particular platform. Those who choose to use social media should use it less often, and not as a substitute for proper sources of information. Part of the reason for the decline of journalism is that social media is gaining popularity as a source of news at the expense of professional news sites. Not only does this decrease the quality of information, it also makes it less balanced. Instead of people reading a variety of viewpoints, people increasingly only read viewpoints that concur with their own. Newspapers must regain the significance they once had, even if it means us all paying more money.

Having said that, I’m a strong believer in personal responsibility, including how you conduct yourself online. If you choose to waste your time arguing with strangers on Twitter, that may be very unfortunate. But at the end of the day it is your decision, and you will suffer the consequences. We cannot blame social media companies for our misuse of their products. Instead, a fundamental culture shift is required. Social media’s users should value talent, intelligence and moderation, and shun the frivolous, the attention-seeking and the belligerent. Epicurus was no loner. But he valued meaningful and intimate conversation. He would have viewed the vile cacophony of modern social media with total disapproval.