I mean not to espouse baby boomer rhetoric that shits on millennials and minimizes our real problems but social media really can contribute to general unhappiness and exacerbate mental illnesses, among other things. Social media can be very good for connecting people and learning about new things and perspectives but its negative effects and aspects should also be a point of discussion among milennials and genZ more imo
One notable way this has affected a lot of young people is in a way of body dysmorphia. Last year, plastic surgeons reported an increase of what they call “Snapchat dysmorphia” where people want to get surgery to look like their faces with Snapchat filters on. Among this, it can also aggravate eating disorders for people.
There’s also the instant gratification that our generation has increasingly become used to which worsens our dependence on our various social media platforms and can greatly increase dissatisfaction when we don’t get new notifications or interactions with a post we make. Which may have a negative effect on people’s self esteem when their posts don’t get enough likes or desired attention.
Another thing I think that social media has done is that it has normalized a lot of otherwise alarming and rare things. For example, images of gore or videos of death are just not out of the ordinary anymore. I’m not saying it’s everywhere you turn but it’s just not exactly as shocking anymore because of how common it has become.
Additionally, I think that social media has also normalized advertisements. Advertisements used to be confined in very limited spaces: billboards, television, magazines and newspapers, and radios. But now they’ve become more pervasive and we’re increasingly desensitized to it. I mean look at Instagram, half your friends are trying to. Convince you to buy things under the guise of being an “influencer.” Your favorite youtubers are constantly selling you things and we’ve accepted this as just fairly normal. But imagine what people trying to sell you things looked like pre-social media? It was the Avon lady your mom avoided at supermarkets or the telemarketer you hung up on; it was less invasive and we could opt out.
And don’t even get me started on our data being harvested and used to finetune our advertisements. And this is getting increasingly accurate hence why there are times that you were just thinking about something and bam, you see an ad for it and it feels like they’re reading your mind. Nah fam, their profile on you is just so precise that it can almost predict what you’re thinking and it’s only going to get more precise.
Am I saying social media is flat out bad? No, I mean I’m posting this on a social media website, hoping to reach and interact with people on this matter. But what I am saying is that I feel like as people more directly affected by social media then previous generations, we should really start having more conversations about how it’s potentially negatively shaping our generation’s society and subsequent ones before it’s too late to change things
I love that you’ve brought this up and I really want this to be a big topic of discussion. People who write software and create systems like this are so concerned about what they can do and don’t necessarily think of how that impacts people. The systems work great— exactly as they are designed— and yet the impacts on the brain don’t matter as long as the software gets what it wants: attention.
I have no idea what relationship people will have with social media when they grew up with it surrounding them, to a degree we’ve never seen before. And I wish there were some guidelines to establishing healthy habits, because limiting time on the screen isn’t going to stop people from banking all of their emotions on that screen time. They need to learn how to see social media in a healthy way, and I don’t even know if I do that myself.
