Disconnecting
#WOKE: How are social media metrics affecting our sense of self-worth? By extension, how are they affecting our overall understanding of value? What are the potential societal consequences of carelessly valuing social media metrics?
Being in a world consumed by technology and media, it is nearly impossible to disconnect from social media. Personally, I know that checking my social media is a daily function that I perform throughout almost any spare moment that I have.
It is a common practice to keep up with social media influencers on their daily lives and it is easy to compare our own lives to theirs. It is also easy to compare the amount of likes and followers on their photos and pages to our own, and think of those values as a sense of worth.
To speak from my personal experiences on social media, posting a selfie to Instagram can make you very vulnerable if you hold a lot of value within the amount of likes you receive. When posting a new photo, I and many of my friends will text each other and say something like, “Hey, go like my last insta post.” For myself, it is easy for me to disconnect my sense of self-worth with my social media following, but I have seen friends delete photos on their personal pages because they feel they didn’t get enough likes. Although it is hard to remember, I think that if you like a photo enough to share, you should share it.
When doing social media professionally, caring about social media metrics is more relevant because often times your amount of likes and followers generates capital. But when we start to care about our social media metrics on our personal accounts, that is when it can become damaging. In terms of societal consequences, valuing these social media metrics in a way, let these social media outlets control us.
We receive ideas of what other people think is beautiful based on how many likes something has which results in us changing and working towards the other things we see to gain that attention, in hopes that it is fulfilling. Between the end of high school and the beginning of university, I struggled with comparing myself to those with large followings, those who looked a certain way and I tried to fit myself into these ideas of beauty. At one point, I realized I was right where I wanted to be with likes, following, etc. but I didn’t feel any different than I did before I started paying attention to these things.
It sounds very cliché, but one thing I realized was that when I stopped trying to change the things I liked to post and the image I wanted to have and instead started being more genuine on my social media outlets, working harder to express my personal style and image, I realized that I was a lot more satisfied in the end. But it is hard to disconnect and not everybody comes to the same realization that I did. I remember a time where not everybody had a cell phone or a laptop, so maybe that is a reason I am able to disconnect from technology a little bit, but it makes me wonder how easy or hard it is for those who were born into a time where technology has always easily accessible, to disconnect. It also makes me wonder if social media followings in terms of status will become the same as wearing brand name clothes and driving brand name clothes in the developing future.
