Are We Obsessed With Likes?
Instagram likes. Twitter likes. Facebook likes. As much as we want to say that these numbers do not affect us, deep down they do, and they are not something we can escape. We see these numbers everywhere. Notifications come up on our phones each time we get a like, the number of likes, retweets, or shares is labeled directly below each post, and we feel the pressure to like others’ posts. In some ways, likes have become a central purpose of social media.
We have all had that sinking feeling we get when our post does not receive as many likes as we had hoped or when you see someone who gets three times as many likes as you. The feeling is sometimes inevitable, but every time it happens to me I ask myself why? Why do I care so much about the number of likes I receive on a picture or post? Unfortunately, I have discovered that our society has grown to associate the number of likes one gets on a post to how popular that person is. I’m sure most of us have looked at someone on a social media site and seen that they receive hundreds of likes and thought to ourselves “oh, they must be popular.” I guess our obsession with likes is just part of being in a society that is centered around social media, but are we so focused on how others view us online that we have forgotten how we are perceived in reality?
Today, we turn to the number of Instagram likes or Twitter retweets we get to gauge how much people “like” us. It’s sometimes frustrating because as much as try not to let our number of likes bother us, it still does. I tell myself often that the pictures or posts we see on an individual’s social media is not a true representation of who they really are, and the same goes for my own accounts. So if there is more to an individual than just their Instagram pictures or funny tweets, how can we base how much ourselves or others are liked in reality by the number listed under our posts?
Parents, teachers, and mentors often tell us “likes don’t define you.” Many times I just brush the comment off and think “they’re adults, they don’t get it,” when in reality, I’m the one who does not get it. There is so much more to an individual than how popular they are on a social media site. It is almost as if we need to change the saying “you can’t judge a book by its cover” to “you can’t judge a person by their social media.” So whether someone gets 2 likes or 200 likes, that number is just a number, nothing more.
