The Blessing and Burden of the World in My Pocket

Every day, before I have even made my way to the lecture hall in Otaniemi, I have already scrolled through three continents: a friend travelling in the South of France, protests in Indonesia, and some student-model-athlete-influencer attending a PR event in Los Angeles. Social media connects us across cultures and beyond country borders, but the constant flood of information, tragedies, and comparison can be overwhelming. The world is now at our fingertips, but at what cost?

Lately, I have been thinking that it must not be healthy for humans to be updated about so many things all the time. As I am about to sit down in the lecture hall, I try to make conscious effort to focus on the lecture that is about to start. I keep thinking about the cool picture that my friend posted, the injustice that led to the protests, and how enviable it is that some people seem to have the time to do everything and that my life isn’t as interesting as theirs. Half an hour into the lecture, I open Instagram to text my friend to ask her to eat lunch together. My attention is once again taken away by a post by someone from university documenting their previous night out with friends, and Yle reporting that suspicious drones have been spotted at the Copenhagen and Oslo Airports.

As we are constantly exposed to news, trends, opinions, and lifestyles both willingly and unwillingly, it’s no wonder that emotional fatigue is creeping up on us. We feel the weight of global chaos that we cannot control, see the highlight reels of people around us and people who we have never met, and make comparisons between our lives and their lives. We feel always connected, yet rarely grounded.

Despite the pressure that social media creates, it can also open doors for empathy, creativity, and belonging that weren’t possible before. When I was studying abroad, I found myself laughing about the same Instagram reels with my new friends that we had seen before even setting foot in Singapore. People can discover incredible communities for niche interests, and marginalized groups have an opportunity to find support networks that they might not otherwise have. Artists get access to a wider audience, and people can learn about the daily lives of others through authentic media. For example, when TikTok was about to be banned in the US, a wave of curious users from America and other countries flooded to Xiaohongshu (a Chinese social media platform), prompting users to exchange pictures of their daily lives and promoting cross-cultural understanding.

So, if you ask me whether digital globalization is good or bad, I cannot give you a definite answer. However, I think we could all benefit from mindful consumption of social media content. After my lectures, I had some free time on my hands and decided to go back on Instagram. This time, I clicked on my profile and methodically unfollowed every celebrity whose work I haven’t been keeping up with in a while, as well as every content creator who I started following because of a particular post, but whose content did not end up resonating with me after all.

Digital globalization has given us front-row seats to the world, but sometimes it is okay to step out of the theater. The beauty of connection is best felt when we choose depth over noise: meet up with your friends even when it feels exhausting, put down your phone, and ask them about their weekend instead of mindlessly scrolling through the infinite feed.