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Journalism of Courage
Social media has taken over every aspect of our being, playing a major role in our lives. However, despite all its pros, social media apps can also make you extremely “gullible”, believes singer Billie Eilish, who shared a complicated relationship with the internet. Opening up about the same on Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend podcast, the Grammy winner revealed that she has deleted all social media apps from her phone.
“I don’t look at it anymore. I deleted it all off my phone, which is such a huge deal for me. Because dude, you didn’t have the internet to grow up with,” the 21-year-old said, adding how the internet seeped into her life as she grew up. “I feel like I grew up in the perfect time of the internet when it wasn’t so internet-y that I didn’t have a childhood. I really had such a childhood, and I was doing stuff all the time. It was like computers and games on computers, but barely.”
She continued: “And then when I became a pre-teen, there were iPhones, and then I got a little older, there was all of what has become, but being a pre-teen and a teenager on the internet, those were my people, I was one of them.”
As the singer got famous, Eilish found herself getting turned off by whatever was written or spoken about her. “I’m a person who goes on the internet… And slowly the videos that I’m watching and the things that I see on the internet are, like, about me. I’m, like, ‘Eww, stinky.’ I don’t like that. That’s the other thing that freaks me out about the internet is how gullible it makes you. Anything I read on the internet, I believe. Me. I know for a fact that’s stupid, and I shouldn’t do that because I have proof it’s not all true; almost none of it’s true.”
She went on to reveal that she once watched a video about herself on social media in which the person was disparaging her without even knowing her personally. “It was like, ‘Billie Eilish is a horrible person.’ And then it was a very serious video of why. The person seemed in the right head space and they were saying all of these things. I was like, ‘Jeez, wow’. It’s just such a crazy reality that I live in. I’m like, ‘That’s my face. That’s my name. That’s me. Oh, interesting. OK. Alright’.”
She added, “It’s these definitive statements that they know are right, somehow they know, somebody told them. God came down and said, ‘This is the truth about Billie and you know it for a fact. You don’t know her, but you know that this is the truth and you have to tell everybody about it and everyone’s going to believe it.'”
The singer shared that sometimes she sees photos of herself on social media that don’t clearly show what she was actually doing at the time, making her wonder how much information on the internet is actually true. “That’s such a small lie, but I’m like, ‘Why would you even need to lie about that?’ It just is very strange and then it makes me like, ‘Wow, how much was a lie that I was reading when I was looking at the internet all those years?'” she said on the podcast.
Talking about these aspects of social media, Drisha Dey, a consultant psychologist from Kolkata, said that social media tends to perpetuate the idea that what we have or who we are is never up to the mark, and the grass is always greener on the other side. “This leads us to constantly strive for more while comparing ourselves to others. The issue lies in the fact that the goalpost is forever moving further and further away from us,” she explained.
The expert added that we live in the age of connectivity and yet we’ve never felt more profoundly disconnected. “Objectively, it should have made it easier to put forward our thoughts effortlessly. In reality, we have become so embroiled in in-group vs out-groupism that we don’t know how to sustain relationships while disagreeing with the other person and to entertain healthy dispute and conflict resolution. They either belong with us or they’re cancelled. Historically, when we avoid scrutiny, the results are usually grave.”
Adding, Shinjini Deb, a clinical psychologist from Kolkata, shared that social media usage without purpose many times leads to believing in things which may not essentially be 100 per cent true. “It acts as an escape space for many where they want to voice the reality they prefer. Hence, ending up in a confusing space with high set expectations. While voicing what one wants and putting effort to build an idea and coming up with programs to create awareness on the other hand there are people who aren’t really sure about the persona they want to put out. That’s where trolling begins. Trolling is one such communication method that has more negative impacts on people in ways innumerable. It pushes one to believe in only the worst about themselves while setting aside their abilities,” she explained.
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