Facebook, Twitter, Snap Chat, Instagram: you name it and I’m sure we’ve all spent a good amount of time in college posting things or “stalking” someone else. Now when we meet someone at a party, hear a story about them, or live in their building, we look them up on Facebook. We see things about this person who we hardly know, and things we would never know. Social media doesn’t allow us to get away from a person such as an ex or a terrible roommate. It’s so easy to “check-in” on a person via social media, however sometimes we aren’t doing it for the right reason. We sometimes find ourselves searching a person we would never know who they were unless we typed in their name to the Facebook search bar. Other than that, they could be walking next to us on campus and we would have no idea that who they were.
Social Media sites allow us into a person’s world completely. Seeing where they vacation via Instragram pictures or what party they went to last weekend by someone writing on their wall. We spend too much time trying to learn who people are through social media rather than just picking up the phone, or talking to them in person. Even though social media sites allow people to share everything about their life, it’s very impersonal to someone who is trying to figure them out through the digital world. We can look up social media on our phones, laptops, tablets, iPods, etc. It’s so easy to consume our lives wasting time on what other people are doing rather than focusing on what you are doing. We are learning things about a person we would have never known unless we saw it on their social media site. Sometimes it takes away the need to even have a conversation with a person. In a sense it’s taking away from our privacy even though we are choosing to share certain experiences and moments of our lives on social media because people who hardly know us are seeing those moments and we are seeing theirs.
It’s interesting because social media can take away from meeting a person for the first time and really getting to know them verses putting together a certain image you have of a person through their Facebook page. Sometimes people who are so shy will shock you and Tweet some things you wouldn’t even picture them saying. This shows that social media gives others a platform to say something they wouldn’t really say in real life and could alter your image of that person. However if you don’t actually know the person, you might have the entirely wrong image of them. We ourselves can even create the wrong image of ourselves to other people depending on the content we post as well.
There have been many times I have wasted time and energy looking through people’s social media sites who I didn’t even know. I was consuming my life and time on someone I’ve only heard things about. Sure there are many times that I’m so happy myself or friends have posted pictures, or tweets because those are memories to me. There are also moments of ours that are posted on social media that aren’t our best experiences but they are still ours. Paying better attention to the things you want people to see or not to see on social media also helps protects our privacy in the long run.