Why don't I have a home if I posted a tweet?

Every time we create a profile on a social network, an alternative self is born that will replace us in various daily functions." This was the greatest seductive power of the networks when they were launched: they saved our time by taking on repetitive, expensive, boring tasks... We would no longer have to call to transmit information, regularly write down the numbers of our new contacts in a diary, notify each one of them about a birthday or a specific celebration...

Gradually, and almost without realizing it, we were shifting more power to the virtual self: socialize for me, since I'm staying home today, because from here I can talk to my friends just like I used to do at the pub; seduce for me, since it will be easier for me to flirt if, instead of having to approach someone I don't know, I upload some photos in which I look attractive and steer the conversations that arise towards my own territory; chat for me, and to do so I'll schedule tomorrow's posts... All very pragmatic, but not without problems, such as, paradoxically, we invest the time that social networks save us in actually using them.

“Isn’t it madness to strive for more and more free time if we then don’t know what to do with it and need an entire industry to help us pass the time, at great expense?” asks Anagrama Prize-winning essayist José Luis Pardo, in the prologue to a fundamental work for understanding the social deformation in which we live: The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord (Pre-Textos).

The decrease in physical contact is excruciating for anyone still developing their social skills.

The fact that the actions now performed by our virtual interfaces involve a significant decrease in physical contact, in face-to-face socializing, is appalling for anyone still developing their social skills, and harmful in the long run for those who experienced, before the advent of smartphones, a more natural and warm way of socializing.

The absence of physical presence ultimately makes us feel sad and lonely. “Technology induces sadness as a state of mind. This 'technological sadness' is manufactured by the recommendations offered to us by social media and digital platforms,” argues Dutch research professor Geert Lovink, whose work casts doubt on the supposed benefits that social media brings to our mood.

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Isolated and lonely, we have no choice but to try to change the world with our posts, but expecting a tweet to alter our reality is like expecting a photo of the Instafoodie 's food to satisfy our hunger. The transfer of our own, human functions to an intangible interface gives us a false sense of agency, when it only contains demonstrations and vague ideas. Either we wake up and demonstrate day after day, for example, for decent housing, or we sit back and wait for our inheritance, but let's face it: neither the vulture funds nor the landlords are going to give us a like.