Take a Break from Social Media
For my first blog post, I decided to review the episode “You Have 0 Friends” of the animated sitcom South Park. It is a little old, from 2010, to be exact, but I still think it brings out some important issues that are still very much relevant today. In the episode, the main characters Kyle, Cartman, and Kenny make Stan a Facebook profile against his will and he becomes extremely frustrated with everyone asking him for friend requests. He eventually gives into the peer pressure and starts using Facebook. Suddenly, he loses all of his friends due to his befriending of a boy without any other Facebook friends and Stan’s “friend stock” (as South Park cleverly calls it) takes a nosedive.
At a glance, the South Park is just making fun of Facebook and the cult that surrounds it. If you go deeper, however, South Park is really showing the audience how we, as a society, are becoming more and more focused and reliant on our social media profiles and the problems that it causes. That was eight years ago and we are no less addicted to social media than we were then. Nowadays, 95% of all teenagers in the US have a smartphone and 45% say they are online “almost constantly”. (http://www.pewinternet.org/2018/05/31/teens-social-media-technology-2018/) We all use Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, etc., myself included, but it has to stop somewhere. Some people I know are so obsessed with having as many followers and getting as many likes as possible that they start caring about that more than fostering actual real life relationships. I am not saying that we should stop using social media all together, I am encouraging everybody to try to realize that there still a world out there if you take a break from your Snapchat.