How often are you on social media? Think about it for a moment. How many times do you reload Facebook to check new posts, scroll through Instagram, or catch up on the day’s tweets? If you’re a teenager, studies say that the answer is most likely upwards of 8 hours a day.
One-third of your day you are somewhere else immersed in a world that you cannot physically enter. While 8 hours is certainly excessive, I am here to argue that social media is not a drain on our lives. Or at least, it does not have to be.
I am of the generation where the Internet has always been a presence. Social media really emerged when I was in middle school, when the big thing was to get a Facebook. Looking back, I am grateful to my parents for making me wait so long to get one, that by the time I did, it wasn’t really "cool" anymore.
It always seemed to me a luxury, an exciting thing to look at every once in a while, but never a drain on my time. Fast forward five years later, and I unlock my phone every morning to check Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat and more. It has become routine, and I have been taught to resent it, but after deleting apps, re-downloading them out of curiosity, and deleting them again, I have come to realize that social media will never not be a part of my life. I often want to escape the obligation of answering texts and emails, and would much rather call or talk in person, but the social media aspect of it all is something that I find both useful and informative if used correctly.
After the advent of Twitter and Instagram, it seemed for a while that more traditional media sites, such as Facebook, were no longer relevant. Most kids under the age of 17 never even found a need to make an account. As I came to the end of my senior year in high school however, and certainly now that I am in college, I have found a new appreciation for what Facebook has to offer. I have been able to enjoy the journey from senior pictures, to "____ class of 2020!" posts, to prom photos and graduation gowns. I do not advocate for scrolling through Facebook for hours at a time, but being able to check in with what my peers are doing makes me feel more connected to my past, and a lot of the time, very proud of all that they have accomplished. In this day and age, a person's social media accounts are the frame of their personality in the eyes of others. How you choose to present yourself online says a lot about what matters to you, and how you choose to live your life.
Instead of trying to eradicate social media altogether, maybe we should just try to increase the number of factual, positive posts. The internet is not going anywhere, but we have the power to change the way that we communicate. Social media is not bad if we are conscientious about what we post and use it as merely a communication tool rather than as a means of escape. I do not believe that it is something to be blamed as an entity. It exists entirely because of what we choose to share, and if we increase the quality of our dialogues it is one of the greatest resources that we have.
