Diana Wichtel: Now is no time to step away from your phone

"In a way social media gives users more potential agency. There were no privacy settings in the old school gossip mill," writes Diana Wichtel. Photo / Getty Images

Even after 40 years together, some mysteries remain. "You have just spent a ridiculous amount of your time looking at babies on your phone," my partner pointed out. "Why?" What can I say? To escape the pain of human existence. One day it's "Try Not to Laugh with Funny Birds" or the "Ultimate Guilty Dogs Compilation". Another day it's resourceful tiny humans tormenting their tired parents by using the baby monitor as a megaphone: "Mumma. Mumma. MUMMA!" Having the infinite variety and misplaced ingenuity of our kind and other species at your fingertips helps.

Still, he had a point. You know this when the child you used to police over her screen time has to stage an intervention. "Mum. Mum. MUM! Get off your phone." I would sooner check the bathroom scales after a period of pandemic-induced comfort eating than check how many hours a day I spend staring at my mobile. Okay, I checked. It's bad. At least I'm down 28 per cent from the social media zombie apocalypse that was last week.

I'd like to say that a lot of my screen time is spent on something more cerebral, such as reading about 30 of the most bizarre research paper topics of all time. Apparently, research has shown that chickens prefer beautiful people.

There is some serious, if obsessive, reading. A current rabbit hole to be excavated involves people I once had some respect for making it their business to generate excuses for Putin's invasion of Ukraine. Surely somewhere in the prophecies of Nostradamus it is written that when sometime-admired leftist journalist Glenn Greenwald becomes a chummy regular on the show of Fox News' bizarre Tucker Carlson, the end of days is nigh. Clips of Carlson's views on the war are, reportedly, enthusiastically broadcast in Russia. Stop reading these things, my family tells me. It's bad for your mental health.

So back to tracking the descendants of the Bloomsbury Group online. It's become harder since many people decided that Facebook is an evil empire and deleted their accounts. But I would maintain it's no more pointless than the content people I know consume to escape the anxieties of the times: watching endless hours of cricket or bingeing Married at First Sight Australia. I can't judge. I once watched an episode of 90 Day Fiance by accident and barely moved from the couch for two seasons.

My children tell me I'm nosy. No, I'm a journalist, I say, as I check out what became of some childhood acquaintance by scrolling through their carefully curated Instagram. It's called being human. Researchers not busy with the aesthetic preferences of chickens theorise that gossip serves an evolutionary purpose. Primates groom each other to bond. We transmit stories about each other to share social information. I gossip, therefore I am.

In a way social media gives users more potential agency. There were no privacy settings in the old-school gossip mill. People post about themselves online because they want people to look at it and respond. Though I still find the etiquette mystifying. "Why are you replying when you don't follow me?" say some tweeters. Is that the rule? There will always be those who push the boundaries of what is fair and reasonable to say about others. That's why God invented getting ratioed. Karma comes swiftly and in 280 characters these days.

Right now, there's more reason than usual to consume information, to find out what's happening, from the media and from the people on the ground, in Ukraine. And to see those planting themselves on the wrong side of history by trying to excuse what Putin is doing get ratioed. The televising of the war in Vietnam has been credited with helping to bring it to an end. As UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has said, "Ukraine is being decimated before the eyes of the world." Yet the killing goes on.

Now is no time to step away from your phone.

Next week: Steve Braunias