Life outside your own body… Sincerely, Your reflection.
(Are we hiding behind social media?)
Living in such a digital world should concern you as such as it concerns me, from our ever advancing technology providing us with new and exciting machines as well as new and improving devices to promote our poor habit of being on the internet all day, browsing through social media like it’s an addiction; to the accelerating development of our city sky-lines, roads and machines. In all of this change we fail to acknowledge that we ourselves are changing . What we need to think of is “Are we changing for the better or for the worse?”. In blog post by Mary Madden and her other colleagues in 2013, they discussed the growing use of social media to share personal information and their a survey indicated that the number of teenagers who shared their personal information on social media had increased to 91% (2013) from about 79% in 2006.
Social Media
Social media as the name suggests provides us with the ability to connect to like individuals online and build new relationships. Social media acts as a platform for advertisement, a method for promoting business and the most effective one at that seeing as everyone is moving online. However, social media provides has had the most subtle yet unhealthy effect on all of us. Social media has taken our true identities! Do you even recognise yourself in the mirror? Do you really think the you on social media is the same you when you’re not on it. Social media is like an addiction, we just keep wanting more and more. It’s not our fault, everyone likes to feel good, everyone likes to feel like they’re important to a lot of people. That’s why we get excited when we get so many likes on our pictures or we’ve had so many people view our Snapchat story or maybe that one tweet is getting so many retweets, you feel extra important.
It’s such a sad thing that all of that isn’t real. Yup…when you log out or close the app, it’s such a disappointment that you are back in reality. This switch from the social media world to reality could have different effects on you depending on who you are. There are two types of people on social media; there are the classically vain people who go on social media to show off what they have. They constantly want the world to know who they are and they see nothing wrong with it. And then there are those who try to “act” vain or basically pretend to be what they aren’t on social media just so they could be liked or so they could get their pictures liked. These people are often the opposite of what their online presence may suggest, they may be complete introverts but speak to and have multiple conversations online, posing to be the most outgoing person on social media. These kind of people may be called “wannabes”. Most people use social media to mask their true identities, they try to become something that they aren’t because in real life they have a low self esteem and they seem to find comfort online living another li(f)e. Always seeking the public’s approval.
Selfies
With the introduction of the smartphone and the front-facing camera, people have become accustomed to the idea of taking and posting pictures of themselves on social media telling the world where they are, what they’re doing, that they’re having the most exciting time of their life and most importantly even if they don’t know it, that they’re better than us — Classic Vanity.
It is evident from viewing our own lives that we get intoxicated by the feeling we get when we get hundreds of likes on our social media page. Just sit back and think about how you would feel if you posted a picture on Instagram, having over 500 active followers and at the end of the day you get only 5 likes on that your “bomb ass” picture or maybe it was just a really cute picture of your puppy at home. We cannot deny that in addition to the surprise we get initially, there’s a following feeling of emptiness, like something has gone wrong. Our constant reliance on other people’s opinions would destroy us
Risk of being anti-social
According to Kandia Johnson’s post on her blog, “If your mood for the day is based on the number of likes you get for a post, you’re in trouble”. Social media is stopping us from actually becoming social. Half of the people on social media are probably on their bed face pressed into their phones, twitting at the middle of the night. They develop an online image that they can’t live up to in person and that becomes a problem.
Loneliness
Social media gives us the false sense that we have a lot of friends and feeling like you have a lot of friends makes you think that you have a lot of people to rely on and when you’re off social media, you start to feel lonely. Craving for that“love” and attention you always get online. A study descibed in Katherine Hobson’s blog showed that heavy use of social media platforms were liked with isolation and feelings of depression among young adults. the study can’t nail down any particular cause but surveys among youths seemed to provide this evidence.
Oversharing
The thing with social media is that we feel the need to share the most recent things going on in our lives as we see others doing. What do we then do when we crave the attention of others but we do not have anymore to share? We turn to lying. Lying to try to feel among. We turn ourselves to decieptful people all in the name of gaining social media fame or attention. The problem with this is that with time, these lies catch up to us and not only on social media but in real life too.
The larger significance of this topic is that we are too engrossed in technology that we fail to see that it is advancing at an alarming rate and that there are likely dangers to this in addition to all the benefits it brings. What you all as readers should think about after reading this is this “Am I too engrossed in my online social life, that I’m becoming someone I’m not?” And i really hope your answer is not ‘yes’, if not, something has to change for the better.
Self-Reflection
I remember a time in my life where I was always so excited to wake up and post a new picture on my Instagram pages because i couldn’t wait to see the comments my friend would post underneath it. It was like those comments gave me life. I had just recently moved to a new state and didn’t know anyone around where I lived, it was summer time and I was back home on the holidays. I would go to the back of my house where the garden was and stay for hours looking for the right angles ad the right shade of sunlight to take the “perfect” selfie for my Instagram page.
I felt good really, I was happy. I was getting too involved in my online social life that I didn’t mind that i didn’t have a real one. I had somehow gained a false sense of self-confidence. I felt like I had a lot of friends and people to talk to that i never got bored. But it was when I got a subliminal message on twitter from a group of girls from my sixth form college that my self esteem started to drop. They called my pictures ugly and said mean things about me and I started to believe them, so i took the picture down and stoped engaging in public conversations on twitter.
Even though it was a bad experience I got an important message from it, that I should not have gotten caught up with improving my online presence so much that I was doing things just to get attention online. After that experience I made a conscious effort to avoid getting lost in the drama of social media and getting myself lost. I found the real me who ended up not caring about putting up posts if they weren’t going to be of any value. i try my best t engage in as any activities with friends to reduce the amount of time I spend online and I have learned to believe that things do not appear as they seem to on social Media, so I never let what I see affect my reaction.
