First video of the self-awareness series. I decided to dedicate the first issue to topic of social media.
Social media is blamed for many things. More and more articles were publish about damage it’s doing to our life and mental health. Some celebrities even started to willing-fully ditch social media. But is it really as bad as it sounds? I don’t really agree and decided to put my thoughts together on this topic.
You can also skip directly to the end of this article to see the video.
Things social media is most often is getting accused of are:
- unrealistic standards
- online bullying
- procrastination
Unrealistic standards
Social media is severely blamed of showing people’s life from unrealistic angle – photoshopped pictures, selective life-events sharing, too-cute girls with a LOT of makeup – basically “to good to be true”. This all resonates with people in a way that one starts to compare oneself with this pitch-perfect lifestyle and gets disappointed that own life doesn’t match it.
I don’t agree that social media brought it in, since before that the magazines were doing the exact same thing. Even before that we were doing it to ourselves, comparing house’s wealth to the neighbors’ ones. Social media just brought it to a whole new level, since now lifestyle of other people is accessible in seconds from any mobile device.
Online bullying
Rare person doesn’t get negative comments online nowadays. If you’re online, you’re most probably get some hate no matter what you do. It’s horrible to which extent now online bullying has developed. However bullying was happily happening even 30 years ago before any mass-access to Internet – everyone has a memory of popular mean bitches from high-school bullying not-so-popular people.
With anonymity of Internet makes online bullying a much serious issue, with no responsibility and accountability. Though with social media bullying got way more grotesque, it’s not it that started that.
Procrastination
Oh the feeling when you start to watch one video on youtube and “wake up” 2 hours later with “what was i doing all this time?”. Social media is really great at sucking the attention with pretty pictures and smart-ass quotes. However when you want to get distracted you would get distracted.
Social media is only a tool – it gets bad or good depending on what you use it for. It can’t be blamed for people’s bad behavior. Social media is just a tool.
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