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I’ve said it so many times, and I’ll say it again, Social Media is taking over the world. But not only the world, it’s taking over our individual lives now too. The way we express ourselves online is changing all the time now. W used to be confined to a simple like on Facebook, but now we have the option to show how we really feel, so we ‘love’ this post? Does this post make us ‘Sad’? Does it make us ‘Haha’?
This could be both good and bad, we have ‘love’ all our friends newest profile pictures for moral support, but we can also ‘sad’ missing cat posts. It still shares it around, and it doesn’t look like you’re happy about someone’s cat gone missing. But we could also post a video that we think is really funny, and only get 20 ‘likes’ and 2 ’hahas’ and then spiral into the thought that you’re actually not as funny as you think.
With social media, there is the really good, but its always balanced with the really bad. This is why it could be toxic if used for the wrong reasons, and why the fact that we’re all super addicted to it is actually starting to change our behaviour in our every day life.
How Social Media has changed our IRL behaviour
Although I can’t really talk, as being on social media is sort of my job..I do have an opinion on how it is changing us.
Do you ever find yourself at a concert, you’ve been excited about seeing your favourite band for weeks and weeks and when you get there and look around, all you can see if phones up in the air? And then when you get home you realise that you spent 80% of the night watching the concert through your own smart phone screen as you tried to capture the perfect picture to post later on Instagram.
Pics or it Didn’t Happen
Because what’s the point of living life and doing cool things and going to awesome concerts if your peers on social media don’t know about it?
People care more about what people think about them online than they do about what people think of them in real life.
People are lazy. Period. We are always looking to shortcut our way through life. We need a shorter drive to work, we need a faster internet connection, we need a faster way to speak to people online. This is where acronyms were born. It was too much to write ‘What are you doing?’ so we created ‘wuu2’. It was too much work to write that we found something funny, so we created ‘lol’, and then if we found something really funny we write ‘lmao’.
Now we’ve taken to actually saying these in person. At first we were saying it just as a joke, but now it’s become the in thing. We say ‘LOL’, and ‘Selfie’ all the time now. The word ‘Selfie’ has now even been added to the oxford dictionary. Did I mention how social media is taking over?
Phones can Call People?
There were days where the only way to get in contact with someone was by phoning them on the landline. There would be one phone, even a little seat and table for it to sit on out in the hall so you had a tiny bit of privacy (it was in the hall, of course you could press your ear to the door to listen in to the goss < is that another acronym. I think so.) But now, we save phone calls for the awkward ‘thanks for the birthday gifts’ and the really important ‘I need to talk to you..NOW’ ‘s. We have our friend in a group chat, we have text and facebook messenger, and twitter and snapchat that we can use to spam our friends when we want to talk to them.
I can go days without physically talking to any of my friends because I have them on these social media platforms. And I don’t miss them, I can even get sick of them..but it’s easier to ignore a Snapchat than it is to ignore them when they’re there in person.
We can do everything on our phones, we don’t even speak to the dominoes delivery guy, we have an app for that too. We can live our entire lives online and miss the world going by infront of our eyes.
We live online, and it’s a big deal when our phones die and we go an hour without it. It’s almost like a personal achievement to go any length of time without checking twitter.
We don’t miss anything though, because everything is online. We get our latest news- we have an app for that. We get our celebrity gossip, we shop online, buy food online, talk to our friends online, work online. We can survive by living with a phone glued to our hands. But are we living?
Social media has changed the way we live our lives, and I’m not entirely sure it’s for the better.