Dear Essena,
I have followed you on Instagram for countless years. I used to want to be you. Hell, I still kind of do. I think you are ultimate body goals, you have amazing hair, you’re athletic and healthy, you have millions of followers on social media, you have created a career on social media! I wish I could look and be like you.
The exact thing that you are trying to steer girls away from. I understand what you mean. Social media is time consuming and it has taken over our generations lives. As a waitress there are many times when I will approach a table only to find the couple completely absorbed in their cell phones instead of with each other, or when I walk to class and I bump into five other people because they are concentrating on their phone, I do it as well, I skipped a step and almost fell down the stairs because I was looking at Instagram. When I put up a picture, I check obsessively to see how many likes I have, anything under 20 means I have to take the picture down. I edit these pictures, I put them up during specific 'high traffic' times of the day, I only tweet things that will get favorites and retweets, I purposely leave my Facebook as empty as possible so that I seem like a nonchalant facebook user, even though I check the site about 500 times a day. I am completely absorbed in social media. However, I do not think that is a bad thing.
Yes, I understand your point, social media has become the world for most people. For many, they cannot tear their eyes away from the screen and similar to you, they get their confidence from the amount of likes they get on a picture. This is the negative side of social media. The negative side is the girls who put up pictures wearing nothing but underwear in order to obtain likes and followers, the negative side is those who only feel they are socially validated if they get a certain number of likes, the negative side is everything that you talked about. BUT, I still cannot agree with you that social media is this terrible thing.
The idea of social content sharing is actually a phenomenal thing. Instead of reading the newspaper I now go on Twitter and read all of the important news of the day. I don’t think that is bad. I can communicate effectively with sisters in my chapter, sisters in other chapters, my distant family, distant friends, I can keep track of who is doing or involved with what after high school. I can get my voice heard on a national platform like the Odyssey. There are just too many positives that outweigh the negatives in using social media. Social media is the new form of advertising, it connects you with people that you never would have dreamt of, it alerts you to things you never would have known about. I can share my creativity through the posts that I chose to share and the things I chose to caption. While yes, getting 97 likes on a picture makes me feel good, it is not the only thing that makes me happy.
To me, social media is not the idea of promoting other brands that I do not stand for, nor is my use of social media fueled by my need to validate myself. Personally, this does not sound like issues of social media, but rather issues within yourself. To me, and so many others, social media is used as a creative outlet and a way to stay connected. Writing for the Odyssey has allowed me to get my voice heard through social media. Without social media my articles would fade into the oblivion that is the internet. Social media to me is editing my pictures so that they express who I am and what I want my social media to reflect. It is creativity. I use my twitter in order to stay up to date and to, admittedly, bombard my followers with news articles that I think are important, or interesting, or just funny. It is a way to share ideas, it is a way to document the experiences that I have through picture that I get to share with friends and family. Social media is so much more than just getting likes and follows or promoting things that you do not believe in.
Essena, I can see the plea you make for society to stop using social media for validation. However, I have to say that your plea is falling on deaf ears, not everyone has used social media the way you did. Most bloggers and Instagram stars will stand behind the brands they promote, they will use social media in order to get their voice heard and for a creative outlet. Maybe not all, but certainly the majority. Yes, social media has taken over, but it truly is not as bad as you think. I hold you in high regard and am happy for you, the strength, that I am sure it took, to step away from something that makes you so upset is incredible, but I implore you not to generalize an entire generation based on your own insecurities and falsehoods with social media; social media is not all that bad, social sharing is actually a great thing.
Sincerely,
A Self Proclaimed Social Sharing Queen
