As the average person checks his or her phone at least 110 times a day, it's fairly easy to say that technology and social media control our lives. Social media isn't all bad; I would argue that it's how many people find out what's going on in the world today. However, this week it became very clear to me that social media dictates what we see.
I check Facebook and Youtube the most. However, I know many people who use Twitter and Snapchat more. In fact, I have friends who send me news articles over Snapchat. The problem with checking Facebook all the time is that your feed becomes flooded with these Tasty videos.
Honestly, I probably see about 3-5 of these videos a day. When there are so many videos about all the snacks my aunt is going to be making at her Superbowl party, it's hard to see what people are actually talking about. Additionally, most of the people who post regularly on Facebook grew up in a different time and therefore have different ideas and values. They feel as though it's extremely important to share those values on Facebook so that the rest of us have to see them and silently disagree. Unfortunately for me, I'm not very good at that.
Let's talk about Twitter. When I lived in California, the only way I knew how to verify if an earthquake had just happened was to check Twitter. So obviously, it's a reliable source. However, there were several things that happened this week that I didn't hear about but that were supposedly all over Twitter. For example, Kanye West released his album title, Zayn Malik released his first solo song and Rihanna released an entire album. Upon hearing about all of these things, I searched and was not disappointed. Twitter is a great way to understand what's going on in the world through hashtags and the explore feature. It's also a great way for celebrities to interact with their fans. However, Twitter can be kind of a pain. In my experience, it crashes a lot, and it can become cluttered like Facebook. But maybe that's just user error.
I found out about the things that I missed from Twitter by talking to my friends. After talking to them, I discovered there was something I didn't know, and I wanted to look into it more. Social media controls what we see and how we see it. In order to get past the controlling aspect of all social media, we need to talk to people. I know that older generations say that young folk are always on phones, but I think that's a little out of proportion. Sure, I'm on my phone a lot of the time, but I also take time to speak to humans. Sometimes we talk about things we've seen on our phones, and that's how we interact.
I encourage you to look at your social media this week. Pay attention to what you see and how it's presented to you. Is it clear and concise? Or has it been shared 24.9k times and distorted? What media platform do you check the most? What are some things you've missed out on this week because of the way social media portrays information?
