Striking the right balance with social media
They say social media is an idea generator, trend mapper and a strategic compass for all our business ventures. Yet most of us criticise its existence on the grounds that it is a drug today’s generation is addicted to. Despite living in a world with competition as its bedrock, we blame teenagers for trying to look better than others in the materialistic sense, ignoring the abstract aspect of it.
How many of us really commit to understanding the varied reasons behind today’s generation using social media comparatively more than other age groups? How many of us actually understand that social media is a platform for people, namely teenagers, to stay in touch with their friends? Long before the exposure to social networking sites, 13 to 18-year-olds have always talked after school — hanging out at bus stops, local parks, ice cream shops or even public libraries —now they just have a different medium to do the same. We need to learn to accept that human beings have always been social animals. So what gives anyone the right to prevent adolescents from joining virtual group conversations or staying up to date with online events. The digital world is so vast and intricate that it allows one to come across new people and meet them just as if it were for real. Sometimes conversations with strangers can be so therapeutic. At any rate, it beats solitude hands down.
All in all, social media may develop your social skills, make you feel less isolated, enable you to learn more about the present time by exposing you to the harsh realities of life, inject a certain level of creativity and push you towards becoming better citizens of tomorrow! However, things start to go wrong when you don’t exercise caution by establishing boundaries or you don’t pay heed to limits being crossed. Transgressions like these can trap you in a circle of concerns that last a lifetime. We are so obsessed with counting the number of followers we have on Instagram and Twitter – because we want to build an entire “dynasty” of followers. Competition for looking better than the rest has incapacitated us to such an extent that we don’t enjoy a pizza until we put a picture of it on our story. Our short sightedness prevents us from understanding the consequences of being so detached from the from the real world. In the bargain we damage our self-esteem. Today, 95% teenagers are connected to the internet and 85% of them are social media users with the numbers rising each day, resulting in a higher count of victims of cyber bullying.
Our priority, at the moment, should be to understand that social media is a great platform, almost a dream come true but sharing mundane things for self-glorification will only imprison us in an illusion which we choose to believe, allowing ourselves to be deceived!