Saturday, April 2, 2016

5 Issues I Have with Social Media

Social media seems to have taken over our lives, whether or not we want to admit it. We are always posting new statuses on Facebook, testing out new filters on Instagram, and retweeting tweets on Twitter. Social media has done a lot of good by being able to spread the word about different causes and issues so quickly and by giving us access to almost all the information in the world, but there are also tons of things wrong with it as well. 



The first day of my 30 day writing challenge is to talk about the 5 issues I have with social media, and here they are: 

1. Feeling like you need to be on all of them. 
Now I know tons of people that limit themselves to just Instagram or Facebook and not on Twitter/Snapchat/Tumblr/LinkedIn, etc (not to mention dating apps if you're single too!). & especially if you are a blogger like I am, there is even MORE pressure to download all social media apps to be accessible to all potential followers, which then causes us to obsess over what we post and how and when (see points 2 & 5). 

2. We literally & figuratively "filter" our lives to be better than what they may really be. 
I wrote a post on this two years ago. I had gotten so fed up with everyone around me having seemingly "perfect" relationships while Darell & I had a lot of issues that we were working out. But after talking to a professor about it, she helped me realize that people use social media to post the best of their lives most of the time. If they are fighting with their significant others, they are probably not going to post it, and of course that makes sense. With social media, we try to only show the good parts of our lives, fooling the rest of the world into thinking our worlds are more perfect than we see online. 

3. It allows cowards to troll the internet with pointless or hateful comments.
Because people have the ability to be anonymous, they think it's okay to comment on social media posts bullying the original poster or being very insensitive/racist/misogynist with their comments. Those people are cowards because in real life, chances are they would never have even said a thing. 

4. It makes for tons of shallow relationships/"friendships." 
Instagram and Facebook, it's so easy to add or follow someone after meeting them once, only to never speak to them ever again. Yet they know all about your pregnancy announcement and you know all about their new dog. You know (what can be) some intimate details of these peoples' lives, except that you don't interact with them at all. What makes it more awkward is if you added this person before you guys formally met (yet you both have seen each other before/have hung out in the same group before) & you have to act like you don't even know them. Or if you see them while you're out but you guys have to ignore each other as if you don't know each other! 

5. We don't fully live in the moment.
Whether people openly admit it or not, we think about what we want to post next on social media or we want to see what everyone is up to. Some people may say that they're not like that yet you see them on their phones while in a room full of people. I know that because of my blog in the past I have definitely obsessed over social media & was constantly on it, but have since toned it down quite a bit. I'm trying to have a better balance of using social media but staying aware of what's happening around me. 

Surprisingly, it took me a while to come up with these 5 items, simply because a lot of other things were more specific and fell into one or more of these general categories. Now despite this list of course, I still definitely really like and appreciate social media, but with everything there is going to be some negatives. Do you have any other pet peeves with social media? 
Chau for now

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