I’m willing to bet that wherever you go in a public setting today, you will find people fixated on a screen. At a nice restaurant you can find customers making sure to capture a picture of their food before they themselves begin to eat. The first thing people do when they get to an attraction site such as the State of Liberty is to get a picture at the right angle of them there. The saying “photo or it didn’t happen” is starting to become a very common theme in our world today. If you were to look back ten years ago, everyday life would look a lot different. In 2010 for example, a busy day in New York City would be filled with people being present. Everyone would be looking around and talking with each-other. This was a time before social media controlled our thoughts and actions. People judged others off of their perceived character and features, not their followers and posts on Instagram. Fast forward 9 years to 2019, and you would be in a very different setting. Crowds filled with heads fixated downward at the virtual world beneath them. We are slowly losing touch with the world around us.
In today’s society it is possible to communicate and share with anyone on the planet in a matter of seconds. New opportunities to gain attention and fans. Celebrities can now share pictures, videos, and messages with supporters in a casual and personal manner. Social media clearly has a lot of positive features to it. It is entertaining, convenient, and if used in the right way it can create movements aimed to better our society. An example of this is the Black Out Tuesday movement from earlier this year which aimed to show support of the BLM movement and pay respect to those who were killed by police brutality. However, with all the benefits it has to offer, it is easy to loose countless hours to these platforms. Social media is highly addictive and hard to quit. My goal by creating this blog is to learn more about why humans are so strongly compelled to social media and explore the extent and effect to which different people use these apps.
The major 5 major platforms of social media are Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Twitter, and Snapchat. The goal of all these apps is to create the biggest following possible and then post entertaining content which paints whatever picture of yourself you would like to portray. My goal in creating this blog is to further understand why humans are so captivated by social media by paying more attention to the use of technology around me, asking people questions about how they use social media, and being more attentive to my own habits with social media use. Everything I find and any theories I develop will be shared here in this blog and you guys will all be here to join me in this journey of hypothesizing, learning, experimenting, and concluding. Hopefully by the time I type my final period of this blog series we will all have a better understanding of human’s dependance on social media, and will be more aware of the role it plays in our own lives.
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This is a really interesting topic, especially since I definitely fall under the category of “addicted” to social media. I know it’s a terrible habit but its so hard to stop! I’d love to learn more about this situation and hopefully combat my addiction.
This is such a cool blog concept and honestly needs to be talked about way more. I really think our generation is addicted to social media and our phones. Even though that might be considered a bad thing, it is the direction our world is heading towards today. I’m really looking forward to reading about your findings and hopefully learning some tricks to help me realize my own issues with social media!
This is a very interesting topic choice! I am excited to see what all you discover! My sister and I recently did a social media purge where we remove all social media platforms from our phone for a month and it was very eye opening!