There has been an increase in social media platforms over the years with Snapchat, Instagram, Tinder, Twitter and others on the rise. Whatever you use, it turns out that these social media platforms are affecting you in more ways than you likely understand. The rant is all too familiar from parents telling us about what things were like “in my day” and how we are all doomed by the use of cell phones. However, how much of that is true? Studies on the correlation between mental health and social media activity are well researched and understood by now that there appears to be a connection to depression, anxiety, eating disorders and more, just from the use of our cell phones daily. However, do we know how social media as a whole changes who we are and how we behave day-to-day?
A perspective that describes how the idea of imitation comes into play in an article published by Penn State University. It says that “I may identify with a movie character or a celebrity that I like. As I observe myself afterward, I realize that I am only putting on a façade or trying to be someone I am not, playing an imitation game.”
There is more than just describing how social media impacts the way we act and post online. It can be far more fascinating to consider how it changes your behavior offline. The idea can become more a question of is the way you post or how much you post making you into more of a narcissist, or maybe more insecure? Alternatively, in terms of physical behavior, does it change how you act, and your motivation to get things done?
A study detailing these abstract ideas was posted in The US National Library of Medicine National Institutes of Health called “Online Actions with Offline Impact: How Online Social Networks Influence Online and Offline User Behavior.”
Within the experiment, there was a group of 6 million people who would use a smartphone app (an app titled “Azumio,” to be specific.) The purpose of the app was to record and keep track of the physical activity of each person over a period of five years. The experiment follows the way people behave physically, comparing between on and off social media. Two years into the research, the creators added a social media feature into the app. The idea was to add more of a social factor to it where you can add friends, including the ability to get notifications of your friends’ activity posts. The experiment shows that joining a social network increases online user activity and offline user activity. This seems to suggest that users are not only using the activity feature to get attention and praise but presumably for themselves. While this only shows the effect in terms of physical behavior and not emotional, it gives promise that the rise in social media could have some real benefits.
There is endless information and discussion about life in the digital age, but amid the overwhelming wave of opinions, it gives us something truly worth investigating and learning from. If Instagram really is controlling us, it is something we should all like to know of.
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Edited by Katie Carnefix