Rachael Kent was interviewed for a piece in The Independent on “What happens psychologically when we’re cut off from social media?”, exploring what the recent outage of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp tells us about our social media addictions. Here are a couple of quotes from the piece:
This showed just how addicted many of us are to social media. “It was hugely challenging and immediately forced us to not only have a digital detox, but also confront our addictive relationship with not only our phones, but also the applications themselves,” explains Dr. Kent.
For Kent, this relationship “really illustrates how much they’d have become an extension of our physicality, as a mediating tool to enable so much: community, connection, communication, sociality. The inability to stop picking it up despite the fact that you know it’s not working really illustrates that dependence.”