Remember in Alice in Wonderland how Alice is a curious girl and how she follows the White Rabbit down the rabbit hole to see what she can find? That is pretty much all of us who are avid (or general) social media users. We are curious people so we follow the “white rabbit,” or in this case, different social media links, down the “rabbit hole.”

We tell ourselves that we will only spend a few minutes on social media, maybe as a quick five-minute study break. Of course, we are all lying to ourselves because no social media study break is ever that short. One minute you are checking out what your best friend posted on Instagram, and suddenly you find yourself on some obscure Instagram page. Or maybe you were catching up on some news via Facebook, because Facebook can be a good way to get news if you ‘like’ news pages, whether it be the New York Times or Buzzfeed News.

You might see a certain celebrity talking about their new movie or TV show, so you head over to IMDB to see what else they were in and what other info you can learn about them. Soon, you find yourself on the page of a music producer of a movie that flopped back in the 60’s from clicking on different actors/actresses or TV shows/movies one too many times. You didn’t mean to end up there. It just happened because you found yourself falling down that rabbit hole.

The fact is, this all happens because we are so wrapped up in what is happening in the social media realm that we forget about everything else. I fall victim to this every day and I have to constantly stop myself from going too far. We live in a world where seeing what people had for lunch is more important than actually sitting across from that person and having a meal with them, unless they don’t live anywhere near you. As a society, we have become so reliant on social media to be our primary form of communicating with everyone that we have almost forgotten how to be social without it.

We are falling deeper and deeper into this rabbit hole, not just by going form Instagram account to the next, but we have found ourselves so incredibly lost that it is becoming harder and harder to go back.

I love social media, don’t get me wrong. I want to work professionally in social media and help companies expand their online presence, especially since social media has become so huge and will continue to grow and expand. However, we shouldn’t be falling victim to this rabbit hole because we will eventually get lost in Wonderland and some of us may never return.

Social media is a good thing, especially when it comes to keeping in touch with those who don’t live near us, but that doesn’t mean we should be completely lost in wonderland. We need to come back to reality at some point.