Social media: Your wingman, or your GF’s jealous best friend?

We’re just in it for the Insta

The world I inhabit is vastly different to the one my parents knew.

Finding old pals, interacting with a cute girl, or seeing how your favorite Basketball player feels about, say, Cheerios are only a click, swipe, or tweet away. The world is at our very fingertips and, yet, instead of using the greatest advancements in social connectivity to express thought, we have somehow lost touch with our own mind somewhere between the @OscarWildeQuotes and Jesus’ second coming, @KanyeWest.

Though Wilde was available to my parents, and they also had their share of delusional musicians like Bob Dylan or Jim Morrison, the fact of the matter is that they liked it simply because they liked it, not because it happened to appear on their Twitter feed and they’d look cool if they “re-tweeted” it.

Their society allowed them to embrace their individuality; they would join the Peace Corps or become the first Steve Jobs. However, our generation seems set on becoming the next one. The difference is that every time we try to be individuals, we have everyone and their great aunt to comment, “Wut r u doin?”

Due to apps like Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, my life has revolved around what others are doing, saying, and thinking, hindering my sense of individuality and self-knowledge, forcing me to ask: Have I shaped myself due to my knowledge of the world around me or has the world shaped me due to its knowledge of me?

If someone were to ask me, “Why do you use social networking sites or apps?” I would honestly have no idea how to respond. Because it’s fun, I guess?

The truth is, we inherently have a desire to show off or “top” one another, and now we a have a vessel to do it in. We want to know what others are doing in order to assure ourselves that we have better lives than our Snapchat friends.

We rarely capture actual times of happiness in Instagram pictures because when we’re happy, we don’t care about others knowing we’re happy, thus, our pictures, whether “candid” or not, are just artsy proclamations of “Look at me pretending to have fun!” Even if we do capture times of happiness, we don’t post the picture because how we look like when we’re truly happy is not in tune with what we want to look like when experiencing said emotion.

How can we possibly have meaningful conversations or interactions if we filter our thoughts like insta pics, trying to get the most-liked response? If we require the approval of others, how could we possibly be individuals?

Individualism is a dying ideal.

We struggle with identifying ourselves while simultaneously fixating on the public’s idea of who we are, who we’ve been and who we should be. Through social networking platforms, different peoples from across the globe have access to each other’s lives, and the wants and desires that make it up.

We renounced our sense of privacy when we first scrolled down to sign that Terms and Conditions agreement way back when.

Though services such as Snapchat, Facebook, and other forms of media have allowed us to be aware of the events of the world around us as they unfold, being hyper-focused on the lives of others and what others say and think is not necessarily a good thing. It is our constant subjection to external thought that forces us to go down the “road most travelled” rather than venture into uncharted territory.

In the grand scheme of things, we are merely a “Friend” on a list; a face in a book.

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Tufts University