No matter how popular social media gets, the backlash that attacks technology users always seems to be twice as widespread. As much as it’s a trend to Snapchat every dinner you eat, as much as it’s now a habit to check Instagram 10 times an hour, it’s even more so a consistent urge for people to trash people who are on their phones.
It’s one thing to call out your friend who’s ignoring your story about a failed test in favor of checking into the restaurant you’re at on Facebook. But, it’s a completely different thing to shit on everyone who pulls out their phones to take a picture or momentarily texts a friend to confirm plans. Technology doesn’t ruin face-to-face interaction. In fact, when you look at social media, a lot of the content that people post involve other people. We want to capture birthday outings and crazy nights and happy occasions and emotional moments; there’s nothing wrong with immortalizing those and sharing them with the people in our lives.
From all the cartoons that mock technology, you’d think we’d all be becoming best friends with strangers on the subway if we weren’t all obsessed with our phones. However, the fact is that commuters are antisocial and even if we were all sitting on the train without our phones, there is no way anyone would be talking to each other. Our phones allow us to connect with the people we give a crap about, even if we only care about those people in a petty or intrusively curious way. Seeing a picture of a high school nemesis and obsessively texting your friends to see whether anyone knows if that guy in the picture is her boyfriend or not is still more productive than making small talk with strangers.
We can overanalyze our obsession with tech all we want. We can talk about how Snapchat makes our FOMO skyrocket, and how *insert unsourced statistic that you pulled from some sketchy article*
proves that phones cause depression, but it’s just not that deep. We use social media because it’s fun, because we like it, because we’re social creatures. We use it because it keeps us occupied and entertained. Taking selfies with friends on a night out doesn’t change the fact that everyone laughed their asses off right after the picture was taken; watching a cat video on Facebook only makes you look forward to coming home to your fluffy baby more. Your pseudo-intellectual post about the “horror” of dating someone without social media is bullshit, and the fact that you shared this video through Facebook only makes it stink of pretentiousness even more.
