Is social media social?
It’s called social media but is it really that social when we communicate with our ‘friends’ from behind a screen? Speaking of friends, when I was younger, I had a small group of close friends; about ten. When I was out with ‘the boys’ we had fun sometimes. I’m sure there was many hours of boredom but there was fun. There was, of course, that pressure I felt to fit in, to sometimes put on 'a show’ and be the person they expected me to be. At the very least I tried not to embarrass myself in front of them. The thing about meeting up face to face is that it’s very difficult to not be real. It’s difficult to hide real feelings or emotions. You can’t always pretend. At the end of friend time, I’d go home. I’d eat, relax and sleep. That pattern repeated almost daily but the break from my friends was healthy. We appreciated each other that bit more as we weren’t with each other 24/7. Also, impressing my friends for a couple of hours was doable.
Today, people have hundreds, if not thousands of ‘friends’ on social media. They’re called friends but are they really friends? I’ll get back to that later. Today children have all these friends posting all these images and stories about how great their lives are. I sought approval from my ten friends. Today, on social media, we seek approval from hundreds or thousands. I was being monitored for a couple of hours a day. On social media it’s 24/7 - there’s no escape. This is stressful. We can’t be switched on like that all the time. We need breaks. We need to ‘be ourselves’ most of the time - all the time really. A great quote I once read - ‘Be yourself, everyone else is taken’. Be yourself is great advice indeed. All too often we try to be someone else in the hope we get approval from others. It’s not the path to happiness or contentment.
Can you really have hundreds of friends? Maybe you can. Maybe I’m not the best person to answer this question. I’m not the extrovert or Mr. popular. But I don’t ever remember being unpopular. I was pretty normal. I played sport. I had friends. I had fun in college. How well can you really get to know those people? And how many of them would you trust with your darkest secret? How many would care if you were ill in bed? Are they really friends? Or just people playing the same game you are playing? The social media game. The game of posts, likes, friends and followers.
The very people that developed these social media platforms have come out and said they knew what they were building was addictive. They knew that doing ‘likes’ to posts would change human behaviour. Why didn’t you like my most recent post? Are we still friends? They knew the features they added were brain hacking us, stealing our attention and focus from other more worthwhile activities. Are we gaining more friends and becoming more sociable? Or are we becoming more self-obsessed and addicted to these applications? It’s important to ask these questions. Social media is here to stay. New players will come, and old ones will die away, and these platforms will evolve. They’re hard to avoid but like my mother always says - ‘everything in moderation!’.