The Impact of Social Media

As we discussed in lecture on Tuesday (before we watched Dr. Strangelove), social media has taken over our lives — everyone from small children to people who are our parents’ age seem to be heavily involved and invested in some sort of social media. I shared the (disturbing) story of how my brother now has an alarm on his phone to remind him to send some form of snapchat to his friends in order to maintain his ‘streaks,’ but it later became clearer to me that  this isn’t that weird for children his age nowadays and at some level, my activity on social media is similar. I think almost all social media use is to garner some sort of social attention/acceptance and to create a sort of social status among your peers, but we sometimes talk about that like it’s a bad thing; however, I think desiring these things and acting with these things in mind is pretty standard human behavior regardless of what “time” you’re from.

In the 70s when it became popular (in America) to oppose the government, live freely, and be accepting of drug use, plenty of people were worried and disturbed by what the youth was becoming, but this happened because humans constantly evolve and that’s the direction they wanted to go in at that time. When we look back at that now, it doesn’t seem that bad — if  anything it seems like it was a necessary change in lifestyle to afford us some of the freedoms and liberties we have today that we enjoy very much. In the same ilk, I think our generation likes to acknowledge the impact of social media and the “damage” it has done to society in an attempt to feel self-righteous. But at the same time, I think that if we were given the option to delete all social media from our lives or keep it the way it is/in the same direction it’s headed, very few people would choose to completely rid our society of social media. Social media and the change it has brought isn’t necessarily bad, but people hate change (especially when they are left behind). I don’t think that kids twenty years from now will be worse off than kids now because who am I to define what good kids are, but they will definitely be different and I think that is what all the hooplah about the impact of social media is about.