Wake up, check Instagram. Go to class, take a Snapchat. Eat lunch with friends, scroll through Facebook. Do homework, take a break to sift through Snapchat stories. Get ready for bed, post a picture on Instagram. Wake up and repeat.
For the majority of this semester, I felt like my days were dictated and demarcated by social media. Whether it was looking to see what other people were up to or posting different parts of my day, I constantly found myself glued to my phone. I was consumed by sites like Instagram and Snapchat, which continuously spew out content and create addictive behaviors.
Although social networking sites are designed to improve communication between people and have many other uses, including but not limited to activism and advertising, in my experience, they often hinder any form of actual socialization. Rather, they are competitive platforms where people seek to stay relevant and validated by receiving x-amount of views and “likes” on their posts. Pictures and videos were once tools used for documenting important events in people’s lives. However, with the introduction of social media, people tend to share pictures and videos that are less focused on significant events and instead highlight trivial parts of their day. Not everything in your life has to be wrought with meaning and purpose. I am sure your sandwich was delicious, but I doubt it was deserving of an entire post.
It seems no matter where I go, people are mindlessly scrolling through social media sites or posting photos and videos to their accounts. This by no means qualifies as a socializing to me. I believe social interaction requires actively talking and investing in a person which is more readily accomplished by face to face contact than passively viewing or liking someone’s post. Moreover, when in group settings, people are often more focused on capturing the perfect photo or video of a given event to share on their social media accounts. Instead of enjoying each other’s company, they then spend the rest of the time editing their digital memento and checking to see how many views or “likes” it receives. If such tendencies continue to be the norm, I worry for how my generation and the growing pool of social media addicts will fare in future social engagements.
Aside from inhibiting my social interactions, social media sites also invoked a sense of dissatisfaction in me in regards to the current status of my life and my appearance. Reflecting back to when I first created my social media accounts, I was a young teenager. For the remainder of my teenage years and early onset of my 20s my social media use grew and expanded to different platforms which consequently caused my relationships and self esteem to suffer. My feed would be flooded with exciting travel pictures, videos of music festivals, and flawless photos of models. These posts stirred up feelings of jealousy and insecurity in regards to what I was doing or how I looked. Although I acknowledged that these sites fed my anxiety, especially Instagram, I continued to use them profusely because I was addicted.
To avoid falling any deeper into the social media abyss, I deleted my Instagram app a month ago and limited my use of Snapchat and Facebook. The disappearance of a single colorful square on my phone screen caused me to immediately feel less anxious. Refraining from publicizing my life and viewing the over embellished posts of others has relieved me of social media’s pressure to broadcast my life while staying up to date with everyone else’s, including people I barely knew or would likely never encounter. In addition, I feel more immersed in the lives of my friends and family because I have more direct contact with them and no longer rely on snapshots of their lives on social media to feel informed. Although I have not eliminated social media from my life entirely, I use Snapchat and Facebook sparingly to receive updates on my friends and family, school related events, or news stories while posting little to no content about my own life.
So if you are not making yourself highly visible in cyberspace by posting a constant stream of content to your social media accounts do you risk becoming invisible or obsolete? Contrary to popular belief, you still exist and matter even if you are not using or posting on social media. While I doubt the prominence of social media in people’s lives will decline in the near future, I hope people will more readily and actively engage in meaningful person to person interactions instead of relying on virtual networks to “communicate” and validate their lives.