Could our year of enforced isolation finally burst the social media bubble?

I was at university when social media first started to rear its head. I was supposed to be studying for final year exams, but wait – have you heard of this thing called Facebook?

It was a novelty, of course. A distraction, definitely. I searched out old friends and nosed at former boyfriends. I wrote pointless, mostly untrue updates on what I was doing, back when the only option was to finish the sentence ‘Lottie is…’. I added 50 blurry, unflattering photos from every night out. A couple of weeks in, once I had added everyone I knew and stalked everyone I didn’t, the novelty wore off.

If you had told me then that 15 years later there would be a global pandemic and this strange online popularity contest would be our only social lifeline, I would have laughed in your face and said you’d been reading too much dystopian fiction. Yet, here we are.