In this day and age, over 75 percent of people who use the internet have a social media account.The beauty of it is that within the touch of a few buttons, you can instantly be connected to anyone in the world within a few seconds. Communication has vastly improved between people and friendships are made easier. Yet, more teenagers than ever are reporting feelings of loneliness and "FOMO", or the fear of being left out. So what’s going on?
In an age of instant interconnectivity, social media has allowed us to get the illusion of having hundreds of “friends” when we really only regularly speak to less than one hundred. We’re losing the face to face interaction that it takes to build a true friendship and instead, replacing it with “favorite for an honest dm” posts in an attempt to create one-step friendships in order to feel fulfilled while we procrastinate our responsibilities. When I go out to eat with friends, everyone spends half the meal on their phones tweeting about funny things that our friends said. I am guilty of this just as much as the next person. It has become a priority as a society for us to put even the most intimate details about our life on our Facebooks for the whole world to see, yet we are hesitant to say hello to someone new in class. Suddenly, our lives are being taken over by a glowing screen with a little blue bird icon.
On the other hand, social media has inspired a more educated generation. It is a fact that teenagers now are significantly more politically involved than they were twenty years ago, which is exemplified by the growing voting demographics for young people. We are instantly able to discuss views with those of opposing viewpoints within seconds and connect with those who have similar views. Some teenagers are choosing to use social media as a platform to formulate petitions and fight for changes to be made in the world, which is difficult to twist into a bad thing. So, the question is, where are we falling short? How can it be that social media is both making us smarter and lonelier at the same time and how do we find a happy medium?
The reality of it is that social media is a valuable tool that we have been given that people are overusing and misusing. In moderation, visiting your twitter feed or sharing your trip to Europe is a healthy way to stay connected with old friends. As long as we can learn to set boundaries for ourselves, social media can be a powerful tool to promote social change and communicate with a wider variety of people. If we can learn to keep our lives balanced and have social media be only a small part of it, we can watch our world improve. Most importantly, just look up every once and a while and see the real world outside of a glowing screen; that's where the magic really happens.
