Social Media and Me

To me, social media is a way of staying connected. As a member of a generation that has never known life without an internet access, I can attest to the fact that it really has dominated every aspect of our lives. For young people especially, it is said that social media has created an environment in which nobody speaks to each other anymore. I disagree. Instead, I propose that this generation is the most social of all time. What people don’t think about when they complain about unsocial millennials is the simple fact we are not staring at our screens all the time talking to no one. What interests me the most about social media is the fact that, with just a few taps on the screen, I can be in contact with old friends from high school, girls I went to camp with that I haven’t seen in years, relatives who live in other states, and whoever else I choose to send a message to. Before the birth of smartphones and social media, unless you were a very diligent letter writer, you would eventually fall out of touch with the people in your life if you didn’t see them all the time.

Within just the past ten years, the world has seen so much technological advancement and discovery that it is truly mind-boggling. With every new advancement, it seems, comes with new social media platforms to explore. Snapchat was only created in 2011, and yet many of us couldn’t imagine going a day without adding to our story or viewing a friend’s snaps. However, one must only remember the fate of MySpace and remember how quickly something you have can become something you had.

Moving forward, I am under no delusion that sites such as Facebook will exist forever. Even Snapchat and Instagram, which are often thought of as Facebook’s hot new contenders, will see their usership drop as new and more exciting platforms come out. In the future, I think social media will become even more personal and less private than ever before. With the invention of virtual reality opens up plenty of exciting new possibilities. Consider a future in which rather than talking to your friends back home on a computer screen, your virtual self can instead chat them up in their own living room. It’ll be a long time before this is possible, but I believe this sort of integration between the new technology of virtual reality and social media is inevitable.