I’m sure that a lot of people find themselves lost in the sea of social media that has swarmed our lives in such a quick hurry. Considering just 10 years ago social media was nothing like it is today, that shows how much a “thing” can consume a culture or even the world. Social media has, in fact, taken over the world, and it’s the reason so many are confused, angry, annoyed, estranged, and worried about social media.
But on the other side of the coin, people love it. People wouldn’t change a single thing about social media and how it’s taken over our attention more than anything else the world has ever produced in the past handful of decades. Social media has changed our lives for the better, in the eyes of some, by being able to connect with long distance friends and stay in touch with family. It’s created job opportunities via LinkedIn, made people money by being Instagram influencers, and helped candidates win political campaigns on the likes of Facebook. But what may be “beneficial” to some can be seen as harmful or even toxic to others.
It all depends on how you look at all of this social interaction that takes place digitally. If you rewound 30 years, you’d recognize that most people kept their photos stored in cheap moving boxes in their closet or on a bookshelf to access when needed. There was no way to upload photos to your computer and save them to a cloud. It wasn’t possible to pull up any single picture you wanted right away all thanks to advanced storage systems and file organizing. You had to dig around to find what you were looking for, and sometimes photos would be faded or damaged entirely.
So whether you fall in the camp of going back to how things were with your cheap moving boxes full of photos or you simply prefer to keep up with the times and love your digital storage systems, the fact of the matter is that social media is here to stay, and what you choose to do with your time and those applications or websites is up to you.
My suggestion? Look for ways to use these things that can directly impact your life here and now, but don’t spend over an hour a day on the various apps when you could be using that time doing much more important things like hanging out with your friends and family in real time or reading a book that will stick with you a lot longer than a nightly social media feed would.
