Social media has certainly changed the way we look at the world around us. In fact, it’s brought about a perception change in the way we fathom ourselves to the surroundings. By now, each of us who’s on a Facebook, Twitter or Instagram has a social reality and social image- with respect to things we like, pages we follow, ideas related to travel, multiple viewing points and in regards to what we espouse for or support.
There’s incessant information flowing out there and all the time. A huge positive isn’t it? The communication we often missed in life with most random of people, understanding divergent views that we often craved is now a constant. Another big hit. But what’s an essential low amid the seamless flow of many positives is that social media has opened a vehicle of expression for people who perhaps don’t know where to stop.
To lend more clarity, here’s some context. Imagine the most talkative people around you, who you often had to find a way to ignore or avoid are still out there. The only difference is that instead of being out there in person, for real, they are communicative on the social media. In this case, a constant flood of messages leads to familiar irritation and often, consternation. So the question is how can one ignore these people- some of whom, may certainly be our friends- and how can one prevent oneself from being irritated?
To arrive at the real dilemma, therefore, what can we possibly do on multiple social media platforms in order to phase out or mute people from bugging us whether on Instagram, Facebook or Twitter?
Here’s what you can do on Facebook?
You have the freedom to choose what you wish to see and follow from the perspective of News Feed. This News Feed is designed specifically to give you the freedom to see who you wish to see more of and who you wish to see less of. There’s this simple option of filtering out people from your everyday social media interaction in order to see less and less of those people. So if you wish to temporarily hide someone’s posts from your feed, all you need to do is to – Tap on the three dots to the top right of one of their posts, then choose Snooze for 30 days. After this short break, their posts will return to your feed.
If you wish to take another drastic option, then you need to unfollow them. Simple, right!
Here’s what you can do on Twitter?
There’s also a simple function of muting people on Twitter, quite like on other social media platforms. Simply visit the person’s profile who’s grown into an irritating tyrant and who you no longer wish to subscribe to, click or tap into the three dots on the right-hand side of their profile (this will be their profile page) and then click on mute. And if, it so happens that you experience a change of heart, then you can undo the action by simply choosing to unmute.
This simple procedure will give you the freedom to unfollow tyrants who bore the hell out of you and follow only those who add something interesting to your life.
What to do on Instagram
An insanely popular social media platform, Instagram has made the beautiful world around us a picture album- a charming one at that. But out here, it may happen that some people can spam the earth out of you by way of instant message notifications. While it’s important to let important people in life come in, it’s also equally important to show people the door, without them actually knowing that they’re on their way out. There’s freedom on Insta to mute alerts from specific conversations.
Now, that said, what about the other social media channels that have become a way of being in our lives?
For ‘letting go of people on WhatsApp’, you can turn off alerts for specific conversations. Start by opening a thread that’s becoming too noisy.
Similarly, on Facebook Messenger, amongst the more popular mediums of communication today, you can, quite simply turn off notifications. First, open any thread in your conversation list. It’s that easy, at the end of the day.