Social Media and its Prevalescence in Our Day

Social Media, Is It Worth It?

With technology on the rise, we are living in a new era, and what was known as the impossible has now been made possible. Truly it is an amazement to be able to interact instantly everyday with anyone; to be capable of posting a message or a picture on the World Wide Web and for the world; your family, friends, and anyone else to see. Everyone becomes virtually present even though they may be hundreds of miles away. Interactions and communities form where possibilities of them were slim to none. Technology has brought on a change in the lifestyles of many people; a part of this being the epidemical rise of social media. Now, change is not a negative thing, in fact with change comes growth, rather the focus in this situation is the reasoning behind it all. As R. Buckminster Fuller once said, “humanity is acquiring all the right technology for all the wrong reasons.”(Fuller)

Why are we so intrigued with social media? About 50% of adults used some sort of social media as of 2011 and this percentage is ever still growing.(ProCon) What does Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and all other avenues have to offer that is of absence from our everyday livelihoods? Social media as explained on Wikipedia, “refers to interactions among people in which they create, share, and/or exchange information and ideas in virtual communities and networks.”(Wikipedia) Yes, many of us view social media for instance Facebook and Instagram as a means of communication and promotion, an avenue of educational support, and an opportunity for self expression; nonetheless it promotes an untruthful, narcissistic, and desensitized society.

There is a sense of falsehood in social media. Untruthful information is easily spread and taken up as ...

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...ss accompanied by a self-referential hashtag. Your image is retweeted and tagged and shared. Your screen fills with thumbs-up signs and heart-shaped emoticons. You are "liked" several times over. You feel a shiver of – what, exactly? Approbation? Reassurance? Existential calm? Whatever it is, it's addictive. Soon, you repeat the whole process, trying out a different pose. Again and again, you offer yourself up for public consumption.”

When asked about narcissism in a poll on social networking sites in June by Ypulse, a majority of 1,068 college students, 57%, acknowledged that there peers used the likes of Facebook and Twitter for self-promotion, narcissistically attention-seeking. Almost all of them said they used these sites daily and about 65% of them implied that their generation was more arrogant, self-promoting, ungratified, and narcissistic than ones before.