I am about to say something that may strike you as controversial, but please, bear with me: I don't like social media.
I don't believe that I am necessarily the only one with this opinion, but I do imagine that most of us are reluctant to openly acknowledge it. Social media, after all, is part of our identity as a generation-- we grew up as it became popularized, and for a great deal of us, it has been a central component of our lives. To question its virtue would seem almost hypocritical.
I use social media too, and I won't be shy about saying so. Yet, this year, I've been using it less and less, and doing so has reinforced some of the beliefs that led me to decrease my use in the first place. Simply put, I don't think social media does what it's supposed to do for us--that is, to facilitate communication and allow for the sharing of memorable moments of our lives with friends. If that were the reality, the morning scroll down the ol' news feed would not be experienced like this...
It's no secret that it's unhealthy to spend so much time caring about other people's lives and comparing experiences. However, I'd like to bring attention to the feeling of dissociation from reality that social media, particularly Facebook, tends to foster.
When looking at somebody's Facebook profile, you can typically learn the following: what he/she looks like on a good day, what activities he/she is involved in, whom he/she is friends with, where he/she last went on vacation and maybe some arbitrary stuff like a favorite movie or musical genre. Yet, this really isn't much to go on, and without actually knowing someone, all you have is a collection of assumptions, beliefs, and judgments based on an incomplete (and often meticulously polished) representation of who that person is. You are robbed of getting to know that person for yourself and developing your own opinions.
This reduction of an individual to his or her profile doesn't only impact how we see others, it alters how we perceive ourselves. "Internet-me" is (as is proper for her to be) happy and fun and carefree, and in real life, that's an unrealistic expectation for anyone to hold him or herself to. We selectively share parts of ourselves, and purposefully hide others that don't fit into the streamlined ideal of what is 'cool' or 'normal'. The idiosyncrasies and quirks become unacceptable online, and it translates to insecurity about these characteristics in real life.
Social media is the ultimate enabler of escapism because the world it creates is an imitation of the one we actually inhabit. It's easy to get lost in the digital world, to think of it as interchangeable with the real one, but we should be wary of this. It's impossible to adequately represent a 3-dimensional person in a 2-dimensional domain. We should not reduce other people like this. We should not reduce ourselves like this. If you agree with me (or actually, even if you don't), take a deep breath, log off now and join me in the real world. You may just want to stick around.
