Unplugging ourselves… or not.

Social Media has evolved into much more than a virtual space to post and create connections. I remember when I created my first ever social media profile on Myspace. It was 2005 and this was a big trend amongst young people in my country. At the time, it was just a customizable personal page in which my school friends could write to me if they didn’t want to use MSN messenger. The first big shock that I got from it was when a random person sent me a friend request. How strange it was at that time to know that someone that I didn’t personally know would want to contact me. Flying back to now it is very ironic to think about this, considering the amount of people that I don’t actually know but are somehow ‘connected’ to me via my social media profiles.

‘Digital Detox’ appears to be a very good analogy to me for the vast ocean that is social media these days. Most of us interact with our social media profiles throughout our every day, how many times? Well, I did try to count how many times I went on Facebook on an average day… I stopped an hour later after going on it 6 times for about 2 minutes each time. Putting that in perspective it feels like a lot, and it is. This makes me understand why some people feel the need to ‘unplug’ from their social media for some time. I consider myself good at balancing out the amount of time that I spend in social media with the amount of time that I spend physically interacting with people thus I have never felt the urge to leave my social media profiles.

On the other hand, Van Dijck (2013) points out a term that fully catches my attention: ‘Augmented humanity’, which are “technologies that enhance human social interactions”. And it is because I had never stopped to see my social media in that way. Social media definitely fits into this perspective. How many times have we come across someone we met at some point in the ‘Suggested friends’ tab on Facebook? How many times have we followed a singer we didn’t know had a twitter account because of the ‘who to follow’ section on this social media? These are only small examples on how a social media page enhances the way in which we interact through it.

Social media will continue developing new functions that will most likely surprise us in the near function. It is important for us to define a clear line between what our social online spectrum is and what our reality is and give the latter its righteous relevance.