Ladies footballers ditch their phones to get people talking

Talking Sport with Stephen Glennon

When you think about it, social media – and, in particular, the accessing of it through smart phones – has been as big an influence on modern day society and culture as anything else over the past 50 years. Information, gossip, scandal, it is all now readily available at a person’s fingertips.

While the pursuit of knowledge is far from a bad thing, articles, studies and surveys published in recent times have identified some worrying trends in people’s behaviour when it comes to the time spent on social media and their smart phones.

Galway ladies football captain Edel Concannon didn’t need any of the above to awaken her senses – to realise that the time being exhausted on her smart phone was counter-productive and, indeed, anti-social.

On the evenings she was at home, she, like so many in the country, would squander away her free hours scrolling down her phone, meandering her way around the social media websites, feeding what she describes as “an addiction”. She was oblivious to everyone else in the room, including her parents.

“You are not looking for anything in particular on Twitter or anything but you feel you are missing out on something if you are not scrolling,” she says. “It is a total addiction. Even those times you haven’t your phone with you, you feel like you are missing a limb. It is just such a habit to pick up your phone and scroll.”

Concannon is not alone, and a number of articles published over the past year have highlighted the correlation between social medal, and its easy access through smart phones and tablets, and mental health.

These concerns not only relate to the addictive nature of social media but also extend to the content. It often leads people to unhappily compare their lives with others – or what they think is another person’s life. What they are seeing, in effect, is just one idealised moment caught in the flash of a camera.

It’s not lost on Concannon, who along with her Galway team-mates, are giving up their smart phones for a month to raise awareness about the affects social media can have on mental health. The proceeds will go to Pieta House.

“There are times when you come off Twitter or, more so, Snapchat and I think I am actually doing nothing with my life. All these ones are going to parties or they are going out or going to concerts. Everybody is doing something. Unless you are doing something and putting it up on Snapchat, you feel like you are missing out and that you have no life. That you are doing nothing.

“Other people then get the impression because you are not uploading stuff on your Snapchat or Twitter, you haven’t much of a life. I just think people now feel they need to post up everything they are doing. To give you this impression that they have an amazing lifestyle and they are doing X, Y and Z. It isn’t a true reflection on people’s lives though.”

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.