Soc Med

Social Media
I find the topic of social media to be quite interesting. With how much infamy it has gained in recent times, one would be hard pressed to find someone who hasn’t heard of any of the popular social media sites, YouTube perhaps being the most prominent.
These days teenagers like me are almost constantly fed the rhetoric that social media is a ‘distraction’ and using social media is going to hamper us in every step of our life.
This, I feel, isn’t really true. Social media isn’t the problem here, the problem is how one uses it. Distraction is a big issue; I myself had once been distracted by social media to the point of it actually hampering my studies. But what I have come to learn is, that it all depends on how much you let you and your life be affected by it.
The most common point I see being thrown around is that ‘Instagram influencers mean nothing to me and they will never give me nothing’. This, I feel, is a gross overgeneralisation of what social media is and does. It is much, much more than the millions of influencers one sees on Instagram. I myself am not even on Instagram!
If one consults the dictionary definition of social media, Oxford Languages defines it as, and I quote, “Websites and applications that enable users to create and share content or to participate in social networking.” One can ask, “What is social networking?”. Put simply, it is the use of sites and apps like Twitter, YouTube, Discord or even online forums to find and connect with people with interests similar to the user’s.
Essentially, social media helps us connect and find people who share our interests. This, is a part that’s quite often overlooked, a fact which I find quite saddening.
I have always found it difficult to find people offline who share my interests. Indeed, the most recent time I met a person who shared even a single interest of mine (that being a book series I very much adore) in my school, was back in February, and he was a senior! More recently, I found out that my best friend watches a series which I also adore, and it has been fun talking to her on that.
But that’s exactly my point. I know only two people who share two different interests. And that’s it.
Social media helped me circumvent that. I have always been a huge fan of the Pokémon franchise, and a big nerd about it. But I have never met a single person who knowledge of the franchise equates mine, someone with whom I can discuss what is essentially a big part of my life. When I created an account on Discord, that problem vanished in an instant. I now had people with whom I can talk about all my interests. Talking about the latest games of the Pokémon franchise, or the latest Percy Jackson book never gets old, and I have social media to thank for it. From those talks, blossomed beautiful friendships, which have been steady even until today, three years later.
The point I’m trying to make is: social media sites aren’t just doom and gloom. If one knows how to curate their experience on any site or app, they can find communities and people which fill that very specific niche they can be looking for. It’s not always just about the influencers or the celebs on Twitter and Instagram, you know? The online friends I mentioned previously have had a huge influence on my life, just as much as some of my friends offline. They helped make the two driest years of my life, during the COVID-19 pandemic, just a tiny bit more interesting. I have found writing communities where I can write the silliest fanfiction and we all just laugh it off together, game communities where liveblogging my playthrough and my reactions gets a kick out of my friends, art communities where I can improve my art all the while appreciating the wonderful artwork of my friends.
But of course, even the brightest of lights cast the darkest shadows. The content one sees online can be quite harmful to people, especially if they aren’t in the right mental states. Aside from Discord, I am also fairly active on Twitter, and I have learnt that curation of what you see online is very much required in order to make the best uses of social media. I cannot stress enough just how much one’s experience is improved by the simple act of curating what and what you don’t want to see.
Another thing is distraction and social media hampering our offline lives. As mentioned previously, there was a point in time where I was so distracted by it that my performance took a nosedive. So, I know the effects of what unlimited time on social media can do.
To avoid this, all one needs to know is how to balance their time on social media. I was able to get back on my feet soon enough by just managing my time, not by cutting myself off, because that’s just plain stupid.
However, there are cases where someone can’t get off social media when they should be, someone who’s chronically online. They, in my opinion, should take a break, close whatever site or app they’re using, and in the wise words of Twitter, “touch some grass”.
Finally, I know my experience isn’t universal. There have been genuine cases of social media hampering our offline lives, more than just our academic performances taking a hit. People have been known to lose their lives doing dumb challenges for clout and internet points. All I can say is that, we should approach any social media with caution. It can be a double-edged sword. In the end, it all comes down to the user, and how they use it.