Is Social Media Killing Our Creativity?

Benjamin Franklin, put down that smartphone! We need you to invent cool stuff instead.

If Ben Franklin were alive today, would you find him obsessively scrolling Facebook on his phone? Would Thomas Edison be in his workshop, or on an app? And how about Abraham Lincoln — laboriously drafting the Gettysburg Address until he had it just right, or looking up just the right GIF to post with his Tweets?

For the purposes of this question, really go ahead and substitute any favorites you have in the category of powerful world-changers from days gone by, and let’s think about what we’d find.

Ben Franklin, visionary inventor, statesman, writer of cool aphorisms, networker extraordinaire on two continents. Discovered electricity but not the smartphone.

Maybe it’s just me, but I’m beginning to fear that I’m constantly on the verge of Accomplishing Quite a Lot, and the thing that is keeping me from that breakthrough is, yup, all the time I waste on social media. Not that there aren’t a few satisfying things about participating with social online, but really — what seems to take the biggest hit is actual creative output.

An illustration of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s “Flow,” about the psychology of optimal experience and the barriers that prevent it. Source unknown.

When Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi wrote about “Flow” a few years ago, he reminded us about that creative zone in which great or at least satisfying work takes place — where we are so absorbed…