Am I Vain or Insane?
In today’s social media fuelled society, individuals lust for some sort validation from others. When you post a selfie on Instagram, you may tell yourself that your doing it because you like the picture or whatever reason but in all actuality you are seeking likes, comments and the approval from others. Rationalizing our decision making process is what makes us human… or does it? Back in the day, did people hire professional photographers to take photos of them because they were ‘feeling themselves’ or was it to gain attention and approval from peers and loved ones? I think we have always as humans felt the need to be loved or accepted by their peers.
My thought is backed up with personal experience. I remember when I first began to use the social media platform of Instagram and the rationalization process I would go through before posting something. Would my followers care? Would they like the photo? Would they comment? Would they remember? This process put me in a strange place in terms of understanding my self value. I thought did I really need to show my followers my adventures?
Cut to me actually posting the photo at like 3 am and then passing out, I remember waking up to hundreds of notifications on my phone from Instagram of people liking and commenting. It was at this point where I developed a sort of addiction to the euphoric feeling I was victim to. It was vain. It didn’t do anything for my account really like I didn’t push for my followers to buy my product. I just kind of did it for the feeling of being accepted. It was at that point where I began to value my self in relation to the amount of likes I got. This was bad.
If more and more people begin to base their self worth on the vanity metric then we as a society are in trouble. We stop caring about the content and focus more on the response. Yeah good content will get likes but what defines good content? Is good content an outfit photo on a roof of a building with the CN Tower as the backdrop or is good content a family photo of a trip somewhere? If we strictly base our output of content on the vanity metric then good content is whatever will get more likes. I am guilty of deleting posts that don’t at least get 100 likes. Am I vain for doing that? I’d say yes.
After going through the course content for the class, I began to become more aware of human behaviour. For a while I felt almost depressed that I would think the way I did. This resulted in me going on a social media detox where I wouldn’t post anything for a while to deprive myself of the euphoric rush you get when you post something with alot of likes…
Ultimately, social media metrics can be a very depressing thing to study. Once you start looking at why people do what they do on social media, you begin to question is anything even worth it? Are we all just zombies trying to get our fill of brains or in this instance euphoria? I think that in someways we are. We are all zombies. It is only once you understand that you can do something with the metrics, is when you become WOKE.
