In the past few years, it's become the norm to talk down on social media.
Social media is ruining our society, young people these days don't have any real social skills, all people care about now is like, retweets and follows.
And I do believe that these are all true, I don't believe that the blame should lay solely on social media. We as people have allowed technology and social media to rise to the position that it is in our society today by convincing ourselves that is something that we cannot live without. We have programmed ourselves to crave online interactions rather than physical interactions and obsess over people who don't even know we exist; to curate a perfect online personality instead of showing who we really are -- flaws and all. Social media, which was once a luxury, has now become a necessity.
Don't get me wrong, I understand that the structure of social media itself encourages the behavior I previously described and the latest social media updates are constantly being shoved down our throats. However, I feel like we don't talk about the human contribution as much. It is out of our need to be better than others that we find the need to compare ourselves to other people that we don't even know, pinpointing flaws about them to make ourselves feel better.
Social media is a problem, but so are we as human beings. We want to be better than others by making them feel bad about themselves, appearing as though we are perfect and popular online and doing whatever we can to make sure we are; being overly dependent on technology to interact with people we could easily go out and talk to among other things. When we realize that we are a huge aspect of the control social media has on our lives, then we can have the conversation required to lessen that control.
