Social Media Society...A Continuation on Mobile Devices


Flashback to 2005, I was still in high school and MySpace was the place to be.  Friends would get upset with you if they weren’t in your “top 8”, you would spend hours decorating your profile and finding the perfect song, and it was all about finding the perfect angles for your profile mirror picture.  This was all done on your family’s PC—this was the beginning of online social media. It was also around this time that “The Facebook” became just "Facebook" and was opened up to the public.  Fast forward about five years to late 2010 and you have the beginnings of Instagram.  Social media was blowing up exponentially as more and more people started getting smartphones that enabled them to have social media constantly at their fingertips. But, what makes the social media realm so appealing?  How is it affecting us?  What effects does social media have on our children? 

 According to a July 2017 The Telegraph article, “99% of people aged 16-24 said they had use social media within the last week…spent close to an hour a day using it”.  But what makes social media so popular?  One of the big things is that on social media you get the chance to portray your life perfectly.  You can show only the highlights, the best pictures, and the ultimate goal is to get likes and comments from your followers.  A new form of narcissism, perhaps? In addition to that, social media makes it easy to meet and talk to lots of people at the same time.  Turkle mentioned as we have our mobile devices glued to us we are losing the ability to communicate face to face, all the while, social media conversations are at a whole new level.  Think about your last time at the dinner table, unless you made a conscious effort not to be on your phone, you were almost certainly checking your messages and notifications on social media.  Further, social media can be used for professional reasons.  With sites such as LinkedIn you can basically bring your resume to life with pictures, followers, and who you follow.  This is networking in our modern world, it is no longer so much about happy hours and going to social events.  It is more about your profile picture and how many likes are on that particular photo. 

Sure, social media affords us a whole new world and makes it easy to connect with people globally, but how is social media affecting our psyche?  Here is one example, pretend it’s 2016 again, the Presidential election is amping up and all of a sudden everyone on social media has become a political guru.  Your friends make sure their opinions are heard, their friends comment back, and some people even begin to defriend each other over different political ideologies.  And let’s be real, defriending in the late 2010s is as insulting as hanging the phone up on someone was during the 1990s.  So, what comes of all this?  A Psychology Today article from November 2016 mentions the phrase “Facebook depressed”.  It’s a real thing, too.  Toward the end of 2016 I remember memes all around about how people thought 2016 would never end.  People had been through the ringer with all the “fake news” claims and click bait articles on Facebook.  But did this lead to most staying off social media, the negativity around this election?  No.  Instead the dependence and constant connectivity continues.

 I think of a song by a French artist Stromae to the tune from Carmen.  In this song Stromae chronicles modern humans and how social media is literally devouring us, “"Watch yourself. All those who 'like' you out there, those fake smiles cut like a hashtag”.  The video shows an angry Twitter bird and people enslaved to that bird.  Albeit slightly dark and morbid, there is some truth to it. This dependency on social media has increasingly become an issue. “Those fake smiles cut like a hashtag,” we are excited to see the likes, but really, these likes portray the superficial aspects of the 21st century. In short, while there certainly are pros to social media, the dark side has to do with us losing human capabilities of carrying on regular, uninterrupted conversation.

If Facebook depression is a thing for adults, how is it affecting our children?  I think about my almost 13-year-old cousin, she and I used to be very close and would talk about everything.  These days, you are lucky to even engage in her trivial conversation as she is always glued to her device.  I think about my students, so many of their conversations center around the latest social media gossip.  Then you factor in cyberbullying and the effects of that.  Statistics on cyberbullying are mind-boggling!  Not to mention the increase in time on devices equates to less time being physically active, which in turn means a rise in childhood obesity.  

Social media has certainly been amplified over the past decade.  Keeping up with the Joneses has taken a whole new meaning, these days, it may not be so much about who has the shiniest new car as it is on who has the most likes and followers.  While social media certainly has its pros, “Facebook depression”, and losing the ability to have interrupted conversations are also on the rise. 

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