Living in a digital world, social media: for the best or the worst?
Many people say the future is still ahead of us, but certainly the future is happening now as well and we can’t even realize that sometimes. The arrival of new technologies was only the mere beginning of a new era and with the fast development of it, it became a part of our life. Let’s keep in mind that 58.4% of the world’s population uses social media and let alone the Internet overall: A total of 5 billion people around the world use the internet today — equivalent to 63 percent of the world’s total population.
Social media got implemented in our lives in all aspects like watching videos, posting on social media, connecting with people, reading ebooks, working, studying, learning literally anything and the list goes on.
The never ending-content
We spend too much time on social media or using our devices in general and I’m sure a lot of us get surprised and even shocked to see our screen time reports. We keep wondering: “how did I spend that much time on my phone?” The average person spends a total of 6 hours and 57 minutes looking at a screen each day. And most of the time it goes on social media such as Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Tiktok etc.
The thing is that we do not longer use one electronic device but multiple! We use our phone, laptops, tablets or even Apple Watch. We can switch from these as quickly as possible, like we switch from one app to another one. It seems like we can’t get enough of it, it’s sort of addictive. There is too much entertainment produced every single day, hour and minute: endless scrolling, a full watch later list on YouTube, new tv shows on Netflix, more and more Tiktoks. It seems…endless.
You can sense it when you stay until 3am scrolling on your phone or watching a tv show. The next day you’re exhausted, can’t focus enough in school or work and you earn yourself not really cute bags under eyes.
Social media is not always harmless and especially, the content YOU consume everyday.
“The information we consume matters just as much as the food we put in our body. It affects our thinking, our behavior, how we understand our place in the world. And how we understand others.” — Evan Williams, Co-Founder of Twitter and Medium
Mental and physical impacts of consuming social media
Those apps influence everyone, but especially teenagers, but not only, adults get sensitive about them more than we can imagine. The negative effects of body stereotypes flowing on social media, specially Instagram, can get overwhelming. A negative body image can cause unrealistic expectations of how your body should look and can lead to unhealthy eating behaviors and disordered eating. Teenagers can get easily influenced by what they see, which can cause disorder problems, depression, anxiety and even anorexia.
It is not longer about physical appearance as well, but as humans who like interacting with others, sharing achievements, whether in work, sport or academic, it has its consequences. Including myself, I feel like seeing people of your age or even younger achieving great things is motivational but sometimes it gets overwhelming. You pressure yourself to do more things, to succeed in everything you do and reach the top. But I realized that everyone has a different path and a different pace to achieve their goals.
The risk of digital engagement
We’re so used to share our lives on social media or even little information, that we don’t realize that all the data produced can be highly valuable for a lot of companies who buy data for their businesses. At the beginning of social media people used these platforms to share their private life among family and friends. At the rise of people using it, it became the opposite of before: sharing everything we do to the world.
As we saw in the course 2: digital engagement, that our engagement generates data, we can be the product, maybe our data is the product or simply the data is part of us. We have to be cautious about it and try to protect our data.
However, exposing our digital identities can have a negative impact and get toxic. As it’s faceless, people can comment everything they want behind the screen and they do not care because it’s not face-to-face. Online hate and cyberbullying became such spread issues and especially for teenagers. They’re more likely to experience anxiety and depression, causing devastating offline effects.
New emerging opportunities
However, social media doesn’t only have negative impacts on our lives, it can get really useful in many aspects. It’s a source of information, we can meet new people, discover new places without travelling and even more.
It creates new opportunities, like working with other people, getting more exposure about our ourselves and connecting with people of similar interests. It can be very motivational and inspire people to achieve their goals, like the famous “Study with me” videos on YouTube. Personally, social media allowed me to create an international community on YouTube and Instagram. This lead to being able to work with brands from different countries and it’s something I would have never imagined being able to experience this.
The Internet kept us connected during tough times and the best example is the Covid-19 sanitary crisis. When we were all apart from each other during the lockdown, we had social media as a community and support.
On the course, there was a question: How did the internet help keep you connected to wider society during lockdown? A student anonymously replied:
« Quite a lot of things. To keep in touch with old friends and colleagues. To reach out and talk to people I have never met before. To be part of a discussion with other people from different parts of the world. To find out the latest news. To watch my favourite TV shows and play games. To read emails. To shop. »
Reflection
As a digital citizen, I’ve learned plenty of things in this course and expanded my knowledge. It doesn’t mean because we are all connected, that we have a better understanding of the impact of the Internet. It’s refreshing and interesting to have a course about our digital engagement and the Internet overall, because it’s something we need to be more educated about. The perspective of this course has a different approach and I really liked it because it’s different from other modules and we need change.
Honestly, at the beginning I was a bit afraid about this course being taught online and of not covering well the topics and understanding them. However, I was relieved because since the first day everything was clear and the teachers made a great effort of organization and replying my questions. I acquired more flexibility, contributed to the comments and I had fun learning in a different format.
Something important I gained in this course in my critical thinking skills. Although on other courses we have to use our critical thinking, I actually understood how to better do it. I had a hard time separating what is a misinformation or not, due to the fact that the internet is flooded by everything. It wasn’t easy at all at first, but I feel like I made a progress implementing it in my 3 assessments.
On the other hand, I’ve never properly wrote an article, but it was a great chance to do it here and even publish it so the public can read it. My writing skills improved, especially in the ‘blog style’, which is different from the essays that I’m used to do. It is indeed an achievement for me and I think I will continue writing in the future. At the same time I discovered Medium and I was able to read more deeply articles about our Smart Cities, the futuristic new emerging jobs and more.
As a student in Languages and International business, it is very important to know the risks and the implications of the information running on the Internet. My business and marketing skills are linked to the digital world, which is very important for me to have a better understanding of how to improve them. Currently, I am working on creating my own eco-friendly fashion brand online and manage my community on social media in order to optimize my future business.
The topics that woken up my interest were Smart Cities, The individual, identity and ethics and the employability for a digital future. It is impressive to realize how fast cities are evolving with technology. However, data security made me reflect a lot about how the internet can make information fall into the wrong hands and it is quite scary. We have to protect better our data, because protecting our data is protecting our online and offline identities. This course helped me to improve and have a better understating of the digital world we are living in now.
