I’d Double Tap That
I am going to be honest. When I post a picture on Instagram, I do it for the sense of affirmation and praise that comes along with people liking and commenting on my well crafted picture. I spend hours taking the picture, editing it, and trying to write the perfect caption to accompany it. Does that make me vain and or insecure? To some extent, yes. Do likes and comments on my picture have a real affect on me? To a major extent,yes. We live in a world where social media metrics have a prominent and real effect on our self worth and on our perceived worth by others.
Social Media metrics is how one measures or keeps track of who and how many people are interacting with their content. Such as likes,followers,page views and shares. This is an essential tool for marketers in the business world to understand how they can improve on their value of their brand. This is also very important to the regular user. From the begining of time, Humans have been doing the most to make sure that other people notice them. People have used fashion,money,art and other materialistic tools to emphasize how important they are to others. We crave that attention, its inherent. Social Media has given us the ultimate tool to show off all those things on a faster,international and pratically free platform. We can update our lives instantaously and have the whole world see how cool,interesting, and sexy we are.
These metrics have a grave efffect on our self worth because other people judge you based on it and personally you judge yourself based on these data. You are costantly being watched by other people and being compared to other people. Therefore, there is value in how many likes one gets on their post. This causes people to curate a perfect life on social media. According to Childmind.org, the Stanford “Duck Syndrome” can be applied to how people use social media. Like a duck we appear to be gliding effortlessly in life by posting these perfect pictures but in reality below water/surface we are working really hard to survive. Having this pressure that society and yourself has placed, to appear like everything is perfect can cause people to feel overwhelmed and concealed.
This is the reality of how we measure self worth. People fine more importance in how more followers online then they have real friends offline. One can have clout online but can be totally invisible when walking down a street. We take snaps,Instastories and go Facebook Live to show in real time all the cool stuff we are doing. At any given time you can probaly see on my Snap and Instagram Story what resturant I am eating at. This is because I want people to know that I ate there first (despite me being a “broke” student). People have actually approached me in real life to ask where is a good spot to eat. This image we uphold online does transfer and add or takeaway value from our offline pressence. In 2018, you probably wont get hired unless your Linked In and other Social Media is up to par.
Likes,shares,comments; these Social Media metrics can either make or break you. #woke
Alexandria Montague
