Social Media is for Idiots
I’m completely sure that you have an Instagram or a Facebook account, that you often use YouTube or Twitter… In short, I’m sure you are one of those who daily use social media. You use it for listening to music, talking to your friends, meeting new people, sharing your opinion… for everything. In fact, you are using it right now while reading me!
Nowadays, it seems that people cannot live without all this stuff. Even if you don’t want to use it, you’re sometimes forced to do it. Don’t you believe me? I’ll give you a clear example. At uni, you are forced to have an email account to have access to all the materials you need for the lectures and seminars, to upload your essays, to glance at your marks, etc.
So, everybody is hooked to social media. Yeah, I said it right: everybody. It doesn’t matter how old are you since not only teenagers, but also children and adults are addicted to it. Even my grandma has WhatsApp! I couldn’t imagine at first that she would be able to use a “modern” phone. But what I could imagine even less was that she would be able to use WhatsApp… Then she wanted a Facebook account. She created it and learnt to use it in a few days… I was totally freaking out!
Personally, I use social media daily as well. However, I cannot say if I’m addicted to it or not because, although I spend several hours a day on it, I think I could live without it… In fact, I’m not one of those who likes writing on blogs or expressing his or her thoughts on Twitter. And they do it without considering if what they write can bother other people or not. Also, most of the time they write rubbish.
Nowadays, people talk about every single thing they do. If they wear the blue t-shirt or the green one, if they arrive late to work, if their cat is sick… They even talk about what they have for breakfast, lunch and dinner! Who cares about that? They upload pictures of everything on Facebook… And what about those who use Snapchat? If you want, you can know all about them and their lives without almost knowing them… And this can be a problem.
Sometimes we aren’t aware that we don’t have privacy. I mean, of course we do if we want to. However, we don´t often realise that, by publishing all that, we are showing much more than we maybe want of who we are… We really must be careful about what we publish and what kind of pictures we upload.
This is really important since it can affect us when, for example, looking for a job. Many companies search for information about the people they want to work with before hiring them. And a perfect and easy place to do so is on their profiles such as the one they have on Facebook. So yeah, we must be really careful about posting personal information on the Internet.
On the other hand, one of the things most people do when using social media is communicating with others. There are chats everywhere. Also, they use it for meeting new people. If you knew the large number of pages you can use for meeting new people, you would be amazed… So, today there are less and less face to face meetings.
One of the worst things is that people sometimes lie to please or like others. They lie about their age, about the colour of their eyes… Sometimes they even lie about their names! You can never know whether what they say is truth or not. So, you cannot trust them. You never know… It’s ridiculous meeting people in this way!
Yeah, I really don´t like this part of the social media. We are losing the contact with each other and people don´t care about this. Don’t you think it is much better going to a cafe and tell your friends what happened to you the other day at Harry’s party, rather than tell them the story through WhatsApp?
I’m sure you would enjoy it more going skiing yourself, rather than watching the videos your neighbour posted of the day he spent in the snow!
We spend a lot of time “living” the other’s lives. So, why don’t we stop doing this and start living ours by forgetting about Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter and all that stuff?
With thanks to Jennifer A.
