Surviving Social Media

 

There’s many things in this world I don’t understand, but perhaps the most troubling one is everyone’s obsession with their phones. It truly blows my mind, hours upon hours are spent daily looking at a small screen. I get It though, phones are pretty useful, besides just making calls, they provide access to the interweb, which allows access to social media. They also give you weather updates, music, allows us to pay bills or buy things, gps, take pictures, the list is almost endless.

 

The problem I have though is that social media isn’t socializing, at least I don’t think it is. Personally, I think it takes the human out of the picture. You might be wondering why I’m even going on a rant about this, but the thing is I feel it just wastes everyone’s time, and that’s reason enough for me to advocate against it.

 

It’s like a domino effect. Say a group of friends are hanging out and socializing. Next thing you know someone pulls their phone out for whatever reason, then someone else does it. You don’t want to be that awkward person just sitting there so you get on your phone and start scrolling. And what do you look at, a bunch of selfies, self-proclaimed adventurists out on a mountain or river, people’s birthday posts (why can’t they just give them a call to congratulate them or take them to lunch instead of supposedly telling them over some sort of social media), or some sort of advertising disguised as something else. Then what was supposed to be catching up with old friends, turns into a bunch of people missing out on the real world for the digital world.

 

We all multitask, but just because we can doesn’t mean we should. When trying to enjoy the real world and all it could offer, there’s only so much we can pay attention to. The world is a big place that we already filter just because we can’t pay attention to every bit of it, but through the portal to social media we call our phones, we miss out on all the small details that make up those moments of life we’ll never get back. Take a real moment to realize how much you really care about what you see on social media. Yeah, it allows you to see moments in other people’s lives and see what they’ve been up to, but I’d be willing to bet at least 90% of those people you see on social media, you wouldn’t go out of your way to see, so what’s the point in following them. I’m not calling anyone fake, maybe you get something that I don’t, but what’s the point of following people’s posts or messages if you don’t even know their middle name.

 

I just hope that instead of diving into your social media world every time you get bored, or don’t want to feel awkward, or even just out of habit, you choose to interact with the real world instead. I’m not naïve in believing that social media is going away, I’m a marketing major after all, but I do think people are wasting their lives away giving so much attention to something so irrelevant. What good is all that scrolling going to do 10 years from now. Making real memories in the real world is the only way I see people escaping the prison social media has become. But hey, maybe I’m wrong, maybe people do get something out of all those hours wasted away on their phones.