The Unassuming Addiction
I never had a social media account in high school. It took till the day of prom for me to create a Snapchat. It took till college for me to create a Facebook. My time was never consumed by likes, statuses, and photo posts. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t watch the evolution of my friends worlds revolve around how many likes they received a day, or how a photo could help change their internet aesthetic.
As a photographer, photos were important to me, but for different reasons. I enjoyed taking peoples photos, making them feel important or beautiful in any given moment. Not just when their hair and makeup was done, but when they were sitting in the park with a certain expression on their face that I found natural or captivating.
It was my sophomore year of high school when I realized how much social media had taken over my friends lives. I was taking photos of a friend of mine, and she couldn’t process the idea of analogue photography. As someone who shoots a lot of film, the process is time consuming (though worth it) to see your final prints, since you must process your film and prints individually. My friend desperately wanted to see how they looked at all times. Then, once the photos were developed and she loved them, news that I was a great photographer spread like wildfire across my high school. Girls desperately wanted me to take their photos, so they could increase their Instagram likes.
This discovery let me into understanding an addiction that I feel like people don’t talk about as often as they should-the social media addiction. Especially in girls aged 13–18, the amount of time spent online is astronomical. Many, also, are influenced by the time they spend online, so much so, that they base themselves off others purely of how they look online, regardless of themselves in person. These findings piqued my interest enough that I did my own photo series on my female friends, and stripping their online personas to evoke their true vulnerabilities. It also led me to create a statistical study my senior year, to understand whether girls created artificial competition amongst each other based on what they saw on social media. 62% of participants admitted that they created standards for themselves based on things they saw on social media.
The unassuming addiction that is social media, may not be as life threatening as drugs or alcoholism. But when you start to make unachievable standards for yourself, based on lives that don’t truly exist the way they seem, your mental health proves to be at risk in more ways that one would think. Maybe its time to stop looking at the world that lies in a screen, and look out, and judge it for how it truly is.
