Social Media’s Effect

I want to first off want to state I have no problem with the use of social media. This article yes, will be filled with a ton of criticism, negative affects, and general changes to society, but I am not in any way saying that social media is outright terrible to begin with; it’s not. It’s a fantastic way to digitally connect, share, advertise, and have fun that otherwise wouldn’t exist. We’ve expanded in it so much that we can plan events, sell/buy things, and be as creative as we want. It’s awesome.

With any great advancement though, it doesn’t come without its affect on our mentality and society in general. That is kind of why I wanted to write this. I’ve seen so many instances of what things can evolve into… not because it’s natural, but rather because us as humans tend to have some bad apples that can poison the lot, and that we just do stuff without realizing it. We just kind of bleed into a different society without ever consciously realizing it.

Also, stay to the end; I do have a section for the good side of things!

Anyway, let’s chat about it.

Everything from advertising to individuals have preferences on what we’d like to see, and what others want to see about us. With that, we tend to be highly selective about what goes in and out. This creates a very odd dynamic online where you have your “real“ life and your online persona. You may think “no way, I’m the same in both places” but I assure you with full confidence you aren’t.

SM allows you to portray yourself in a certain way, something that is likely unnatural whether it feels like it or not. There isn’t the you in the room, but rather snippets of your life in the form of words, picture, and videos. Some post everything they ever do. Some post their dirty laundry. Most commonly though, people tend to only post their best - which even if you don’t mean to, you create a very unreal, positive image of yourself to the world. Let's say even if you are trying to be the same person... people only see what you post; little snippets of life where they can interpret it in whatever way they want.

The intake of that info as well, is in your full control. You tired of seeing one of your high school friends post political crap? You can hide it. You want to see the highlight reel of your best friend, there it is. You can also choose to follow and unfollow things, so you only see what you’re interested in. Advertisement is also tailored to you. more likely than not, you’ll search for guitars on your phone and your SM apps will pick that up and throw Guitar Center and Reverb ads on things.

So you may be asking why I’m babbling on. Two words; echo chamber. You stand in it if you’re always on SM. You tell it what you want, it yells back. This creates an unrealistic expecting what life really is; which is full of crap you don’t like, don’t care about, and things that happen around you. That just doesn't happen on SM because it's constantly delivering things you want to see, agree with, and things you generally are interested in.

Sometimes as well, it plays to our disadvantage, as it feeds our own negativity. Let's say you get deep into conspiracy theories and you use TikTok everyday. Honestly, conspiracy theories at their core are just seeing there's a theory, and an endpoint, and people loosely connect things they aren't even sure are related and spit them as fact. It's actually a terrible way to think in life - you create yourself a vacuum of paranoia, distrust, and injustice. Yet, TikTok's algorithm doesn't care. It sees you keep watching things labeled with #conspiracy and keeps delivering more. The same thing could happen if you're political. You may be say, right leaning (Republican party in America), but you get interested in what the other side has to say about... say abortion. TikTok sees you keep watching pro-abortion videos, and keeps delivering you more until you believe that the vast majority of America is against you, because that's all you're seeing... and that's not the truth.

Because there are people choosing to post things, and you know behind the screen there is a human, you tend to automatically connect with those people. There's nothing really wrong with this in theory, but often it manifests itself in ways where we don't realize how much comparison work we're doing.

This is especially prevalent in beauty. The whole of society anywhere is obsessed with selfies, filters, and perfect family photos. So you hop on social media, you see the best pictures of someone all day everyday. You will eventually see it so much, that you'll see it in everywhere. Why isn't my skin this smooth? How is it they look this good all the time? Their family is beautiful and always smiling... so you end up with "I must be doing something wrong." So you'll either end up doing one of two things; you'll start trying to drastically improve your life to those standards of beauty, or you spend an absolutely insane amount of time editing photos, getting the perfect picture, etc.

SM also touts the rich and famous folks. You start seeing your realtor friends post their absolute beasts of houses. You see your other friends buying all their 80k cars. You see all these photos of vacations, trips, and awesome times people are having at work. You know a lot of these folks are JUST like you... so you must be doing something wrong. You inevitably end up in a "keeping up with the Jones" mentality. If you don't know what that is, it's basically that you live next to your neighbors the Jones family. Similar house, similar family, etc. - the problem is, the Jones family buys a fancy new vehicle, and your family notices and wants it, so you work harder for the new car. Next thing you know they get a pool, now you need a pool. So on and so on.

There are plenty of examples I could bring up, but I have more points I want to make here. The point on this section being - what we see on social media doesn't actually represent reality, yet we tend to hold ourselves accountable based on those expectations until we all feel like we've lost at life... and that's just not the reality of it.

Without social media, it's not like we couldn't lie, cheat, steal, and all that jazz. The world's always got some pretty messed up folks, or just provides opportunity for normal people to mess up. SM doesn't help this, because it's so detached from reality, yet bleeds into reality real quick.

Snapchat is about the best thing I can use to represent that. Snapchat, for those who don't know - it's an app where you can chat, send videos back and forth, and interact with others... except the things that are sent are immediately removed afterward. So you send a video to a friend, they watch it, now no one can ever watch it again. You have a chat about that video, it will also go away before you know it. It's literally built for secrecy, whether intentional or not. If you are a cheater for example, you could do it in snapchat and all the evidence disappears right after it happens, enabling those who do it. It's also been used pretty heavily for grooming and predators... which is awful.

It's not like these things don't happen with other SM platforms too. What it does, is provide you closed chat rooms (aka DM's, or direct messages if you don't know), group chats, and private posts and stuff like that. It allows you to operate in the shadows, whether that be cheating, stealing, crap talking, etc. Same concept though; it makes it very easy to do wrong, especially those who are naive. While yes, it's not inherently built for those things, it's just built for more privacy than a public forum, it aids us in our disconnection from the right things and reality.

Again, I want to note; it's not often intentional, it's just a few bad apples poisoning the well, or it feeds us to do things we normally wouldn't.

Now let's shift gears into manipulation. For those who think "my feed is what I want to see" - and you would be right... except the news outlets, influencers, and various advertisements... they know how to get in there. Governments, companies, and people know how to weasel and manipulate, and to be honest, most of it is simply exposure. Someone like me... I have fallen for it, don't get me wrong, many times, but I see through a lot of BS out there. I often see something and I've got to stay away. For other's though, the more they see something, the more they're interested. Manipulation can also happen at a smaller scale, because if you're trying to say argue with a friend, you can't escape a message like you can a room. Your friend may be a narcissist and they very well understand how to use SM against you.

Do not be a fool. If you spend more than say an hour a day on social media, you're probably addicted. Sure, it's not like say a bad cocaine addiction, where it's literally destroying you and your life and the people around you very blatantly. What it is though, is a dopamine addiction, that leads to other addictions, attachments, and issues along with it.

I'll be transparent; my phone tells me every Sunday that my screen time each week is somewhere in the wheelhouse of 5-7 hours a day... and from the studies I've seen, this is quite normal, and it some studies, it's actually a lot less than others. I mean, it used to be worse, but that doesn't excuse it. Where is that time going? Mostly for me, TikTok and YouTube (yeah I don't engage, I just view... I am kind of an introvert). Addiction usually implies something negative, and I can speak from experience here that it's true.

So let's go back to 2016. I was a pretty avid user of Instagram and Facebook. Hours a day I would scroll looking for something interesting, watching everyone's perfect life, seeing all the things I couldn't have... then the world exploded. Those who lived it understand what I mean. After a while, I noticed a change in my behavior, not online, but in real life. I was always depressed, irritated, and frustrated. I started realizing I was that way because of my scrolling habits. In my endless search for dopamine, I was watching my friends, family, and random people destroy each other online, and I was becoming ever so cynical of the world. It wasn't about who was right or wrong... it was about the pure hate. This leads to my next point, but I want to cap this off.

I decided that I was going to free myself. I stopped using FB and Insta for 30 days... and honestly, I never again installed the apps back on my phone. My life become 60% better within the first couple of weeks. I was happier, I was more productive, and I was more loving. Now, still to this day, I have problems with YouTube and TikTok, but I give myself grace here. I'll get there.

You may or may not have heard of this term. So it's basically that you take actions, get angry, and become very aggressive online, but you'd never do any of it in real life. Hence, when you're behind a keyboard you're a warrior, but in real life you're a coward. Online gamers have experienced this phenomenon basically from the beginning. I am sure if you've ever searched "call of duty" you've seen a snippet of some 10 year old kids screaming all sorts of things that shouldn't come out of their mouth that young, knowing well that if they were playing with these guys sitting two feet from them, they'd never say those things or throw fits.

While the online gaming community understands this concept, I don't think the rest of the world has caught up, hence why we have so many small minorities of society that are able to speak very loudly. Not that they don't deserve a voice, but if they were in a public arena with real people, they'd never act like this. This ends up empowering everyone though... if they can do it, so can I. Now everyone seems to believe they're part of some large movement because they yell at each other online.

Don't get me wrong, information is powerful. The public square of opinions and speech is powerful. However, when you mask it with the world going unfiltered online, you don't come out the other side positively. Part of what makes society so powerful is our unity, our ability to listen, communicate, disagree, and be kind. When we're online, we don't have that. We have division, hate, and "standing up" for yourself. We're supposed to use each other to grow. If we're always focused on tearing others down, then we may achieve that, but we don't grow at all. We didn't feed ourselves. In fact, we might see ourselves shrink.

Thus, being a keyboard warrior or interacting with keyboard warriors without understanding the concept affects your worldview, your mental health, and the way that you interact with folks. We shouldn't let that happen but we do. The longer we stay on social media and use it as our source for everything, there is an inevitability of it getting worse.

Look, I won't blame anyone for making money, but scamming goes beyond just your cold callers, and your "I am a prince and want to give you 13 grand" emails. As we grow in market places on the SM platforms, of course there comes all sorts of different issues.

One of the biggest is a lot of these "get rich quick" guys who want to buy and resell at a higher price. I've kind of understood it... like if you find a Gibson guitar worth like 4k new, resells on Reverb/GC for like 2.5k, and there's a pawn shop having it on sale for like 100$, yeah okay. What I don't get though, is people that buy tables for 50$, original price was 100$, and they clean it up and sell it for 130$. Now if you're like renewing an antique, or you're completely fixing something up, or adding some sort of extra value to it, that's fine, but that's not what a lot of people are doing. They just take the concept of buy and resell and think they can make money with no effort. Then there's scalpers. Folks who buy concert tickets at normal price to resell them for much higher once the show sells out.

In addition... you have the evil sides of the market place. People sell things they shouldn't, people treat people like garbage, people try to get your crap for practically nothing because you're desperate. They take advantage of you, because it's over a computer and you can be "safe." Predators, thieves, and violence may await you on the other end. You've heard the stories, you get it.

The problem being is that this type of behavior has basically become normalized in society. This whole section. It drives prices up, it separates people, and it makes for quite a cynical ride, and if not, you're likely the naive one.

The final negative point here I'll bring up before the good I'll get into is disconnection... from reality. I love the term "chronically online." Like it's a sickness. Everything up to this point 100% revolves around social media's ability to disconnect from our lives and move into a different world. We then use this unreal, virtual landscape to manifest what happens in our lives. It's become very backward from where we came from.

You live inside of a bubble on social media. We like to preach how far reaching and amazing accessible everything is via SM, however people want what they want, and that often ends up... you guessed it, an echo chamber. We want to feel validated. We want to feel part of a group. We want to feel heard. Therefore, we flock in droves to communities that do that, and then we end up in these little domes, where we only hear validation. When we hear opposition, we then hear it as a battle. So we fight against it.

Mind you; all while not knowing most of the people you engage with. You can battle because it's a message online. It's a video on TikTok. It's asynchronous engagement. It's your comment in a flood of comments. It doesn't feel like you have a soul staring you in the eyes, it's just a video, just a message, just a picture, just a post. To top it off, when you're done with your crusade, you can literally put your phone down and have a great time eating dinner with your family.

And in reality, you tend to avoid the tough stuff. You tend to engage less. You tend to stop going outside. Then... we're all isolated except for our friends and family. Work from home is a great thing, but it only highlights the problem here. When we have a choice, we'd rather do it in the dopamine, virtual "I can be what I want" world rather than embracing the reality around you.

I could write a book on the negative effects of social media, but let's spread some love here. What has social media done for us in a positive light?

Well first off, despite the last piece being "disconnection," it has actually connected us well. We find long lost friends and family. We get to communicate with others without having to involve them in our lives. We get to share all the cool things in our lives and really show the world who we are. We were never really able to do that before SM became a thing. Many folks have found their partners, best friends, and communities online.

Small businesses and self-owned products and services have also seen quite the boom from social media. You no longer need to pay big bucks for a billboard, or a newspaper or magazine section, etc. - no, you can hit the right market, the right groups, and you can get yourself out there. It really helps us little folk fight the big businesses. I know I personally have bought, found, and used many tiny companies and people from Facebook. Well not me, I don't have the app, but my wife does. "We" have used it I guess. Social media has absolutely changed the way we advertise for the better. Even a no name company without a single customer could find some way to go viral on one platform, gain attention and traction and start taking off.

The idea of being able to "follow" people, products, brands, artists, etc. has also really helped for building true dedicated fanbases and customers. I'll give you a few examples from my own feed; I personally love me some good Solar guitars (Ola Englund's brand). While I may not have the extra cash to burn, I really love his videos on YouTube, which get recommended to me, and it always reminds me to check out his store. It's really awesome that I got to watch it blow up over time. I can tell you though, if not for YouTube, I would've long forgotten about Solar guitars. Eventually, when I get the extra cash, you best bet I'll be purchasing a guitar and become a loyal customer. I would guess that if I have this experience, so many others have bought guitars through the same medium.

Seeing people post online, there's also an opportunity to help. While yes, we do see plenty of division and hate, there's also a side of it that's pure and good. You'll see some single mother who's car broke down, and she's got 3 kids and can't get to her job, and there will be floods of folks paying for Uber, helping her get a car, offering rides, etc. - and some will eventually hook her up to a charity or community that she'll have support for. Also things like GoFundMe and platforms meant for raising cash are advertised and shared across SM platforms. There's always places for advice, keep up and get involved with local communities, and much more.

Let's not also forget about the marketplace; for both things and jobs. For things, we ended up, while still some bad apples, a positive version of Craig's List basically. Not only can you find used and fixer upper things, but you can see who is selling it. You can't just use "Zapper1784Whipper" or whatever and no one knows who you are. In the job market, you had places like LinkedIn, which if you aren't on there, just think of it more like a "professional" version of FB, where you can connect, view companies, and look for jobs without having to dig through 17k posts and job boards. That's changed a bit in today's world, but it was new back then.

Finally here; Social media has skyrocketed the artist's value. Not maybe financially (that's a weird place to think about), but art, music, and various creative endeavors find their start on social media. It's a source of sharing, inspiration, and freedom. I personally believe it's worked to shape the artistic culture in such a positive way over the years.

I think... it's really up to the individual's needs and habits that make or break social media. It's not like social media created any of society's problem; it just helped make it easier to do... as technology often does. If you wanted to do something bad, there was often so many barriers in the way, that it wasn't worth it. Social media takes down a lot of those barriers. In the same way it takes barriers away from following brands you like, connecting with loved ones, and purchasing things locally.

Social media isn't inherently bad, but the way we've taught ourselves to use it is what kills us. Spending hours upon hours a day (and I include myself in this) just isn't healthy in any way. We should focus more on connection with others, groups, and doing more physical activity. We should do less comparing, "research," and involving and exposing ourselves to everything happening in the world. We were meant to live in our own little bubbles, not on worldwide stages.

One of the things that you'll find across many of my articles is the "main character" idea that I've mentioned a ton. Social media helps drives that. Even though you may not see it or realize it, you're catered to. It makes you feel special. It makes you feel heard and important. Thus, you slowly get warped into thinking - "hey I am supposed to be the main character of life" and everyone else is either a side character or someone that doesn't matter. The truth however, is that none of us are the main character here; we're all just little insignificant nobodies that wander this earth looking for love and peace.

Anyway, that was fun. See ya!