It is now an established fact that social media has changed the way we are connected to the world, the unstoppable stream of news demanding our attention and opening a channel into our “inner world” where creativity, ideas, dreams, and fears reside.

US President Barack Obama referred to the same aspect of the social media during a speech he gave at a donors’ gathering in New York recently. “The world has always been messy,” he said. “In part, we’re just noticing now because of social media and our capacity to see in intimate detail the hardships that people are going through.”

At a closer look, social media did not only pave the road for instant news, but for an accompanied stream of gruesome photos and videos of destruction and spilled blood. In ways, the images of beheading and human corpses strewn across streets became part of our daily dosage of social media. It feels like the human life has lost its sanctity.

Add this to the open nature of social media platforms where anyone could easily generate rumors or false information, and you end up with a society filled with fears, depression, and anxiety.

“I can see why a lot of folks are troubled, this is not something that is comparable to the challenges we faced during the Cold War,” Obama said, commenting on the different issues that seem to be distressing the American people these days. There is the so-called Islamic State (IS) and the looming threat of terrorism. There is the Ukrainian-Russian issue and resurrected fears of a new Cold War. There are the different incidents of police cruelty that are bringing back the issue of racism to the fore. All these stories, repeated throughout the different channels of social media are making it look like there is something going wrong with the world, that there is an imminent danger that people should be watching out for and be prepared to face.

In that sense, people in the Arab world are the ones who should be living under a perpetual fear and anxiety. This part of the world is never short of crises; the Palestine issue, the continuing war in Syria, the so-called Arab Spring and its consequences, and now the self-ascribed Islamic State. Actually, you can feel that anxiety in their tweets, in their WhatsApp messages, either in plain panic or disguised in humor.

I think we need to learn how to deal with the stress caused by social media. It is like any other stress we are facing on a daily basis. Social media is part of our lives now and there is no indication (so far!) that it is going away! Maybe by selecting the people we follow and interact with, by learning the basic skills of facts checking and analysis, we could minimize the side effects of social media anxiety.

—

@smaldosari