Social Media is For Idiots
Social media is for idiots, honestly. How often do I get asked about how my social media is doing? More than I can stand. I get asked more about why I’ve not uploaded pictures to Facebook than I do about how my university degree is going. I get linked to more stuff than I have the patience to look at; I swear if someone links me to their FarmVille to water their crops, I’ll be watering their grave. Fuck me, it’s like wading through a swamp except the mud has been replaced with likes, dislikes and emojis. It’s taking the piss.
Maybe it’s just the people I’m around?
When you live with a group of people who are between the ages of 18–20, it becomes a struggle. I’m only a few years into my 20s but there seems to be some sort of brick wall that I can’t see over. A wall plastered with memes and guarded by Instagram likes. It’s 2017! I’ve got people asking me for Instagram likes and all I can think of is ‘why the fuck am I liking this when you’ve got the dog filter on?’
I don’t hate social media, I think I just hate the people who tend to use it.
Growing up before the advent of things like Facebook, MySpace and before the wave of easily accessible social media apps, things have admittedly become much easier to deal with. But in some ways they’ve become much harder. I shouldn’t have to be on my phone all the time to be able to keep in touch with people who would rather talk behind a screen than to my face.
I’m sick of people going ‘check your Snapchat’. Why can’t they just tell me what happened? A picture tells a thousand words, but I’d rather a thousand words of a decent conversation than looking at something captioned that I wasn’t there for. Let my brain fill in the gaps.
Have we gotten to the point where people would rather swap faces than stories?
Use is an interesting word to chosen in this context. Social media ‘users’. The dictionary states addiction as ‘being a condition of being addicted to a particular substance or activity’. A professor at California State University claimed Facebook activates ‘same part of brain as cocaine’. Just about sums it up doesn’t it? Easy to give up but easier to get hooked on. Drawing them back over and over again. One more like. One more upload. Talk to Frank, just don’t expect him to like your Facebook post.
I think another issue I have with it is how much something like Facebook has become so integral to our society. Sure, we’re all linked together like we never have before but the closer we’ve gotten, the further away people seem to be. Facebook stalking runs rampant and in some ways, Facebook is an easy way to ruin someone’s day. All it can take is one word written and posted at the wrong time and someone’ll jump on it, or take something from it that wasn’t meant. Subjectivity aside, it can cause as much hassle as it solves.
Social media breaks things apart just as easily as it can tie them together. Hardly a ‘social’ experience, is it?
I don’t plan this to be one big, long rant against social media or the people that use it, but it’s going to come across as such.
Social media has crept into every part of society. Politicians are on there, spouting whatever they know will hit the mainstream. Look at Donald Trump, as ignorant on some things as he can be, his tweets are rapidly jumped upon because he’s such a high-profile figure. Celebrities with any level of fame are hounded just as much for what they portray on their social media platforms as they do in real life.
There is no longer a divide between a life without social media and one with. It’s there, you can’t get away from it and if you try, it’s going to be a hard ask.
I can’t deny that social media has helped people without a voice speak up, especially when they couldn’t before. The internet allows things to be collected and contained and not merely deleted away. Atrocities around the world can be brought into focus and talked about; but again, who talks about those things when what’s mainstream gets more visibility?
As someone who’s grown up seeing the rise of social media, but not having spent much time in the world before it was such a big thing, I’m stuck in the odd state of not quite knowing where to fit in with it all. I can’t stand what social media does to the younger generations.
I’d rather take the time to look someone in the eyes and talk, than spend my life looking into a black mirror and learning nothing.
Be the change you want to be in the world, is all I can say. But don’t do it behind a screen.
With thanks to
