#WOKE Social Media and Self-Worth
Social Media metrics are a great way of measuring the amount of followers you have actively engaging with you and your online content. They provide quantitative evidence that someone is paying attention. It goes without saying that for or a lot of businesses that do most of their public outreach online, these metrics can serve as a vital tool in measuring your current success and planning your future social media campaigns. For the individual who may be casually posting online, to the semi serious social media personalities out there, metrics such as likes and favourites can have a profound effect on the perception of yourself and what you put online.
I feel as though people who actively use social media every day tend to compare themselves to others way more. I mean, you’re essentially seeing photos of someone’s highlight moments. People might think, are my moments just as cool/special/fun? Why am I not getting as many likes on my photo of a significant event but *insert name here* with thousands of followers gets hundreds of likes on every picture? Getting likes on your photo has become addictive for people, but as good as it feels to get a positive response on something you post, comparing yours to others can have some adverse effects on self esteem. I can’t draw a lot from experience, but from my small accumulation of experiences with social media, I know that it can be a real bummer when people just don’t like your stuff. People can become envious of others and in turn narcissistic when confronted with low social media engagement.
What I feel to be the most troubling thing about social media engagement is that there’s no way to gauge the true importance of a like, favourite, or follow. What could be a seriously affirming thing to you, could be just a fleeting moment for someone trying to escape their own boredom on any given social media platform. We don’t get to read that persons mind and see what they actually think of it, but because its an affirming action to us, we feel a false sense of accomplishment and validation. With this in mind, I feel that the same sentiments occur when you see others having a lot of success with their social media. There is obviously some merit to having a lot of engagement from followers on social media, but sometimes a like is just a like, which is hard to see sometimes. We’ve become careless in the way that we interpret social media metrics in the sense that we put so much importance onto one small action that might not mean anything. I feel like this will only continue as the social media world continues to be dominated by businesses and influencers acting as an example of successful social media usage. People will continue to become more and more invested in validation rather than communication and connectivity. I think that its important for us as a society to not lose sight of what social media was initially brought into the world to do and to not act as a popularity contest or means of judging ourselves too harshly.
