Are you an avid social media user?

Social media in the past ten years has evolved from just a hobby into a daily dose of addiction of snooping into other people’s lives. But has it become too addicting? Should we be using it as often as we do? Here are some pros and cons to having and using social media accounts:

PRO: It keeps you in contact with anyone you meet.

CON: It shows too much of your personal life to people who most likely could care less about you.

PRO: It allows you to express yourself on a platform.

CON: It makes people want to show off and falsely represent their lives better than they actually are.

PRO: It makes it easier to inform loved ones all at once about your achievements.

CON: It can lead to self-sabotage, from comparing your life to other people’s lives even though you don’t know their full story.

PRO: It allows you to figure out what kinds of quotes, ways of life, and type of jokes you enjoy, so in a sense, you get to know yourself better.

CON: You waste hours on social media accounts that could be spent doing something more meaningful and/or productive.

Knowing these arguments, you can be using social media both positively and negatively, and the keyword is BOTH. With anything you do in life, there are pros and cons. Now, if you think the cons outweigh the pros or vice versa, do something about it.

Are you using social media effectively or is it just a way to kill time?

Another argument is that without social media, you are afraid you will feel disconnected from the world. You won’t know what the newest popular hashtag or meme is in the culture that we are in right now and you won’t know what people are joking about at work or in school. You won’t know the newest Snapchat filter or see bits of people’s lives. You will be doing things the more old-fashioned way and asking people for their number the first day you meet them (awkwardly), instead of what their Facebook/Instagram/Snapchat/Twitter may be. You will be looked at as a strange person when someone finds out that you are not on social media.

I personally know a few people without social media and they seem very happy. One girl told me she deleted all of her social media besides Snapchat because, for her, the other platforms brought about a lot of negativity. I can’t blame her. It causes a lot of drama if you add people to your social media account that are internet trolls. I’m sure many of you have experienced that one person who thinks he/she is funny by commenting something they think is “witty” just to get likes. But since we are in college, there’s no room for such negativity; we are grown adults (so I say).

Now you have to decide whether social media is for you. You either take it with the positive AND negative, or don’t have it at all. Remember not EVERYTHING that happens in your life needs to be posted and talked about. Some people keep their relationships private, while others show off online with corny captions. The bottom line is that the pros and cons must be considered, but ultimately you need to decide if having social media accounts is right for you.