Social Media


Social Media


I've had a Facebook account since I was 14 years old. Facebook was pretty new then and this was my first social media account since I never bothered with its predecessor, MySpace (remember that?). My account was actually created by two classmates/acquaintance-friends of mine that I had begged not to. I was wildly unpopular at my elitist/upper-crust high school and even in the 9th grade I knew that social media would replicate these kind of dynamics. However, no matter for the account was made with my email address and the password was given to me: I eventually started using it.

For the most part, using Facebook feels so normal that I don't think twice about it. Millenials like me truly came of age using social media, so it feels like second nature. Even still, I am sometimes perturbed by the lack of privacy and other aspects of it. Since my account was created when I was in high school, there are a good number of people I went to high school with that I am not friends with in real life on my Facebook friends list. The same can be said for college or any other experience: there is this norm of becoming Facebook friends with acquaintances, even people you met once and have no relationship with. On top of that you are posting pictures of yourself and people you love and updates about your life to these people you hardly know; this strikes me as unhealthy and at worst, unsafe.

I have tried to offset my discomfort with this lack of privacy through different methods. Every few years I go through my friends list to remove people that I don't feel I benefit from having on my Facebook or I wouldn't feel comfortable sharing posts to. I have also made my default setting for posts private since I don't want the world to see me, my location or my posts for the most part. My Facebook friends list, compared to the circle of people I know, is not particularly robust or minimalist. My ~ 500 friends list is not in the smaller range (300 or fewer) but also not on the larger side (over 1,000 friends). Nevertheless, I still have people that I don't personally know on my friends list.

Social media doesn't solely worry me because of privacy reasons; I am also worried about the social and cultural implications of social media use. Much like high school, social media can seem like an endless popularity contest. It can feel like you and others are posting content to see how many likes you can get, for the affirmation and validation these likes afford you and for the temporary boost of being in the spotlight and receiving attention in the form of likes and comments. I have noticed that when women post selfies they rack up not only likes but comments affirming their physical attractiveness (you're so pretty! you're so beautiful!).

This is nice and feels good in the moment but I worry that posting selfies (and other pictures of oneself) can become a co-dependent way of receiving affirmation from other people about one's worth, which for women is often conflated with physical attractiveness. What's more, it can feel gross to post a picture of myself online and put myself at the mercy of my friends list: who will like it? Who will comment on it? Even if we know better, the number of likes on posts have meaning attached to them. The more likes one gets, the more popular one appears to be and vice versa. It is very easy to conflate the number of likes your posts get with how popular you are, how much people like you, etc. in real life. However, as I mentioned earlier, many people do not have personal relationships with the people on their friends list; although likes are a form of social currency on social media in real life they have no value.

This is why I chose the image at the top of this page for this blog post. The image's description: in black letters, the words "A million likes will never be enough if you don't like yourself" against a gray backdrop.This is for all of the people who continuously post pictures of themselves looking for validation. This is for all of the people that post online because the likes give them a temporary boost when they are feeling down. At the end of the day, no matter how prevalent it is, the internet does not reflect our offline lives for the most part. Internet addiction can take the same form as any other addiction and I hope that millennials and future generations can take social media with a grain of salt.
Hyphenated Ethiopian third culture kid. Twitter: @moonchereka

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