Some Thoughts Concerning Social Media

When I got my first cell phone, back in the days of flip phones and actual number pads, I wasn’t allowed to text. My parents paid the bill, and texting was an unnecessary expense. The phone was for practicality; it was only after I started taking the bus to school on the other side of town that my parents agreed to buy me one.

As such, I was somewhat out of the digital communication loop. I never felt like I was missing out on much. I’m not a terribly social person, so it wasn’t exactly like I had many people that I would have texted in any case.

Even as I gained more friends and acquaintances, I was never as involved with social media as many other people my age. I set up a Facebook account when I was thirteen, specifically for the purpose of communicating with friends across the Atlantic. I always felt a sense of disdain at the frivolous status updates of my peers, the vanity behind an apparently incessant need to chronicle their lives. As cell phones became smarter and apps more frivolous, my disdain only continued to grow.

My first girlfriend was a Tumblr user. As the victim of abuse, estranged from her family, she was very focussed on the idea of healing and progress. For her, Tumblr was an outlet for the pain she had suffered. She was constantly sharing motivational images, declaring her refusal to “look back,” and posting the occasional tacky poem. It was therapeutic for her, somewhat like journaling, but I could never escape the feeling that her constant posts represented a fixation on the idea of healing, rather than the healing itself.

You see, this is my problem with social media. It prioritizes the idea of something over the thing itself. It seems to me that there is such an engrained consciousness, in so many people, of how they are going to share events in their lives that they end up detracting from the enjoyment of those events.

I went on a hike last summer with a few friends from work. It was great. We drove into the mountains and hiked for a couple of hours to some lakes nestled between two peaks. Along the way, we went off the trail and stopped at a waterfall to just sit for a while, admiring the view and letting the sound of the crashing water rush over us.

And, of course, capture the moment on our cell phones. Within a few hours, we had well over 200 images between us.

Now, I’m not saying that stopping to take photographs is a bad thing. I enjoy photography, and often take my camera on such adventures. For me, it only becomes a problem when preserving and enhancing the scenery becomes more important than experiencing it. Social media perpetuates this sort of behaviour that detracts from experience. When your nose is buried in a phone, checking filters and panorama settings, you can’t possibly experience the full beauty of a mountainside view, the raging power of a waterfall, or even the bitter cold of a winter wind.

Social media is based on a pretense of experience and the illusion of a perfect life. On social media, you can control your appearance. You can present the best possible you, cutting out all the bad bits. On social media, you don’t have to appear insecure. There are no blemishes, no blood sweat and tears, because you only present the best parts, not the drudgery in between. You create the illusion that your entire life is as perfect as your page shows.

As such, there seems to be a sort of competitiveness. Even if most social media users understand the inherently false nature of their medium, there is a subconscious yearning to feel better than their friends. It makes sense. If you are constantly scrolling through a wall of images presenting the best aspects of everyone’s lives, you’re bound to feel a sense of envy, a desire to match it. So, the cycle continues as you resort to the same cherry-picking and filtering in order to create the perfect veneer.

There’s an Instagram account that, I think, really highlights this phenomenon quite well. Socalitybarbie parodies the emptiness of so much social media. Posting images of herself in various “aesthetic” scenes (drinking coffee, eating ice cream, standing on a beach looking out into the horizon) socialitybarbie highlights the vanity of this kind of social media use by placing obviously staged photos of a plastic woman against backdrops of nature and tranquility. The effect would, perhaps, not be so poignant if not for the fact that you could pick any half dozen random Instagram accounts and find near identical photos. This sort of behaviour isn’t limited to Instagram; have a look at Facebook, Tumblr, or Snapchat, and you’ll see the exact same thing.

I don’t have a problem with social media in general. I think it is a wonderful tool that has revolutionized communication and free expression. We live in an age where people have more access to information than ever before. And I think that is fantastic.

However, I think we should be wary not to let social media dominate our experiences. Social media should be a tool for enhancing our lives, not the other way around. Don’t let getting the perfect photo for your aesthetic detract from experiencing the beauty around you; don’t feel the need to validate your life with a motivational meme or inspiring image.

Just live your life. You’ll find things a lot more joyful.

As always, thanks for reading! I know it’s been a while since I’ve posted anything on here but I do plan to get back into it regularly. Stay tuned!