Has Social Media Desensitized Us?
That’s not a rhetorical question. Yes, yes it has.
Over the past decade or so there has been a large increase in social media usage among the whole population. Whether that be middle-aged parents giving their friends updates on everyday life via their Facebook page, young kids watching other kids make slime on YouTube or teenagers posting where they’re out eating on their Snapchat stories. You’ve got some people that check their socials once in a while, not really engrossed in the world of social media. Then you’ve got some people that are literally glued to their phones and constantly checking their notifications. I must say I am guilty of this. Needless to say, whether you like it or not, social media has become a big part of all our lives.
It has impacted the world and the individual lives of people in a number of ways. For starters, with apps such as WhatsApp and Facebook we are now able to interact and stay posted with friends and family from across the globe without running up expensive bills from staying on the phone for hours. Twitter allows us to instantly acquire the breaking news without even watching the news whilst getting live updates from a number of sources. These are the luxuries that a few years ago, we never had. Memes and gifs have become all the craze, they add that little extra bit of pizzazz to our conversations that makes them that much more entertaining. As well as this, people are literally able to have full-blown, highly successful careers off the back of social media. We now have what you call influencers and content creators who may post pictures on Instagram or videos on YouTube and get paid to do so, allowing regular people to have financial freedom just from what would often start off as a hobby for them. Another thing what was unheard of prior to the last couple of years but is now a part of our everyday consumption.
With anything, good always comes with some bad. And social media harbors a lot of bad. It seems as though with the rise of social media has also come with the rise in a lack of empathy and sensitivity people choose to show to others. I’m sure we have all heard stories of celebrities getting continuously getting trolled about their appearance and receiving death threats, often from fake accounts. And it just makes you think, the individuals behind these cruel personas wouldn’t ever dream of saying these hurtful things in real life. So why do they feel as though it is acceptable to speak to complete strangers in such a way online? The anonymity of social media is a breeding ground for insensitivity. People seem to think that just because they are behind the barrier of a fake Instagram page, their words will not affect someone. Which of course is false. There have been countless stories of people, often young teenagers, sadly taking their lives as a result of online bullying. The internet is such a mean place, when in reality it really shouldn’t be. If more consideration was expressed by people on social media then maybe, we’d hear less of these sad stories because no one should be bullied on their personal social media pages so much to the extent they feel like they have to take their life. It is wrong on so many levels.
The recent tragic death of NBA legend Kobe Bryant and his daughter Gianna Bryant further highlighted to me that people on social media have a complete lack of sensitivity towards subjects that require the upmost amount of sensitivity. Rather than allowing his family and close friends time to properly grieve in peace, people took it upon themselves to comment underneath their photos and requesting a public statement from them. In what world is that acceptable? Oh, my bad in the world of social media anything goes. A woman has just lost her husband and her child yet she’s being hounded with messages from entitled strangers. I doubt the first thing on her mind was to make sure she had the perfect Instagram post, yet that was the first thing on others’ minds.
Social media has many positive aspects, but it also has many flaws. Individuals fail to recognize that there are real people with real emotions behind a social media page. We were all taught that if you don’t have anything nice to say, you don’t say anything at all. Yet somehow this rule gets thrown out the window and its acceptable to be rude to others on social media. Why?
Let’s all just be a little kinder to one another.
