Hi there, and welcome back to our blog! This week Josie and Drew discuss their views on social media and what it has done to the society we live in. As a reminder, Josie’s views are in Italics, while Drew’s are in Bold. We hope you enjoy!
The World Wide Web, or the internet as most of us just call it now, went “live” in 1990 thanks to Tim Berners-Lee, an English engineer and computer scientist. Though the internet was around, and had been discussed by many scientists long before the technology to make it happen even existed, Berners-Lee made it popular. The internet we know has evolved far past what it was back then. One thing that has changed about the internet is our fixation as a society to use it as a place to connect and share things with others through social media. In this post, we hope to come to a consensus on weather social media helps or hinders the evolution of our society as a whole.
I personally believe that social media has become a crucial part of the evolution of the society we live in today. This force that we are all sucked into, sometimes at birth or even before (we’re looking at you, people who make their children social media pages at birth, post photos of your children on social media, and post pregnancy announcements), impacts a lot of our daily lives. This impact can be either a positive one, or a negative one. This all depends on who’s looking at your page and why: A potential employer might look at your social media to make a better judgement on your character, to see if you fit in the company or to find a reason to avoid hiring you; A stalker might use social media as a platform to follow your every move (something that might be a lot easier than you think); A family member might use social media to check up on you and see what you might be up to in your life (one thing that I find as a positive, especially when you’re in such a large and spread out family as I am); A hacker might use social media as a resource when trying to steal your personal and private information; The list goes on and on.
When looking at the impact on our daily lives, I believe that social media also has caused an influx of mental and emotional health issues. I have personally dealt with issues regarding mental and emotional health (something I’ll get to in a future blog post), and in my struggles with getting myself to a healthy state, I’ve come across a statement that really hits home for me with regards to it: Depression centers around living in the past, while anxiety centers around living in the future (I’m not exactly sure where the statement comes from, and I do believe that there is a lot more to mental health than simply what this statement brings to the table (Again, I’ll expand further in a future blog post)). Taking this statement into account, I believe that social media helps people fixate on our pasts (via memories of what we’ve posted on our timelines from years past (a lot of platforms even notify you of these memories) being in a very easily accessible location) and also worry about our futures (via the plethora of future events and activities that litter our timelines). Social Media helps us focus on the people and situations in our life that might not have gone as well as we had hoped, causing us to get more emotional over these events in our lives. It also pushes us to focus on all of the chaos that is going on in the world we live in (both good and bad), so we learn to keep all of these things in a place of focus in our minds. This keeps our mind running, never letting us slow down and enjoy the life we live in, never letting us live in the moment, never letting us focus on that all important “me time” due to us focusing on everything going on in everyone else’s lives. Not only that, but social media also causes us to fixate on the attributes we don’t like about ourselves. Our brains actually inflate how we perceive the attributes we dislike, causing us to see ourselves in a light different than how it might actually look (perception to our brains is easily swayed).
Do I believe the solution would be to delete all social media and learn how to focus on simply what is going on in our lives? No (How would I find random videos of puppies and cats when I should be doing something more productive?). I think the solution to our social media addiction would be to find ways to remind ourselves to practice moderation with regards to the time we spend online (believe it or not, I see moderation as the key to a lot of issues we struggle with in our lives). Set a timer whenever you get online, so you can have a physical reminder of how much time you are wasting on the social media, you might be surprised on how much it might actually be. Be diligent in finding the balance of social media, social interaction, and lack of either. Remember, being alone doesn’t always have to be a negative situation. It’s good to find time to focus on you and only you.
To say that social media changed the world, is an understatement. As I’ve grown older and my role in the world has shifted I have seen social media evolve with me. I remember blatantly ignoring my mother and opening my Facebook account. I was in middle school and Facebook was becoming the new thing. People were using to share photos, make dumb posts, and regretting everything they shared. The most important thing about Facebook at that age was the chatting feature. I remember telling my my friends what time I was going to be at home so we could chat online. This was the era of time right after AOL Instant Message got big, but before texting really took off. I had my first phone at a pretty young age because of having a single parent, but none of my friends had phones yet. Facebook was the ideal way to communicate in that day, and social media just exploded after that. Pretty soon this app called Twitter took off followed by Instagram. People were suddenly realizing that it could be a tool to promote products, as well as promote themselves. There are very few people in today’s world that do not have social media somewhere. Even if there’s only one platform; they still have it. I think that Drew and I have very similar feelings about social media and what it’s doing to our generation, but I want to talk about how a social media detox changed my relationship with social media.
Let’s describe my past relationship with social media first. I would describe that relationship as toxic. There are a lot of reasons why I believe it was toxic, but the largest one, and the one I want to focus on in this post is the fact that it took ALL of my time away from me. I used to spend hours scrolling through Twitter waiting for new posts or validation from my own posts. I look back on that time and get frustrated with myself and how attached I was to the validation. I understand that many people do this, but it doesn’t make it any better. I think that this relationship grew and evolved as I got older; especially when I started thinking about marketing or communications as a career option. That’s when I started to see social media as a tool rather than this way to receive more validation.
As someone who’s entire job and future career centers around social media my opinion has shifted a little bit from pessimistic to realist. The fact of the matter is that young people (younger than me) have already embraced this technological overhaul, and they are my future market. There are some serious upsides to social media when it is used to connect people around the world, allows stories to be shared, and topics to be discussed that may have been overlooked in the past. The internet and these platforms have given the entire world a microphone, but the question is; how do we get people to listen. There are a lot of horrible things happening in the world today that have ended as a result of social media trends, movements have been started to protect human rights, and people have been able to make friends on the other side of the world. The question that I think will be continued to be asked is, “Is it worth it?” Is all of this negativity around attention spans, anger, the comparison, or the long lasting effects of low self esteem.
I personally use social media, but in a very controlled manner, and after a lot of self help books. I have always been one to try and please everyone and social media used to be super detrimental to me in that way. Now, I can control how I use it, when I use it, and what I take away from it. The number one thing I would like to remind people about social media is this: This is ONLY the best versions of everyone's’ lives. This is the message that gets lost by all of the pretty images of food, landscapes, and pretty people. Don’t forget that fact, and social media will become easier. I promise.
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