Media Mayhem

Nowadays, almost everybody uses social media. Pick your poison: Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, and even X, formerly known as Twitter. I think, like all things, moderation is vital. Social media is no different. This is why even though social media could be destructive, I think it’s also positive for our future.

Many people are using social media, 4.8 billion to be exact with advances like 5g, quantum computing, artificial intelligence, and even Elon Musk shooting a Tesla into space and creating things such as Neuralink. I think it’s obvious that our future is in technology. I feel as though the only reason people feel this way about social media is because as a race, we are immature, self-conscious, and naive. As a general idea, social media is great; It gives a platform to people who don’t have the means to voice their opinions otherwise. It takes some of the power away from the government and allows our right to freedom of speech to fly free. However, as a society, we are ruining the platform we have been given to speak our minds and shunning people for doing so. For our future, I believe, social media will be a huge asset. Mass information, Ideas, mainstream media, and public opinions will all be at our fingertips if we could just get our act together.

Even though everyone uses it, lots of people disagree with my opinion and believe it’s very destructive to not only one’s mental health but also physical. Lots of people believe social media is bad and share the idea that social media is ruining the mental health of almost all young teens, especially teen girls. The “role models” that they look up to who have tons of makeup and filters on are now readily accessible to young women, tarnishing their beauty standards and leaving them to believe they are ugly, overweight or underweight and unfitting to society’s beauty standards based on the fake standard of what is perceived as “beautiful”. Another shared belief among these people would be that it’s a leading cause of anxiety and lack of confidence in social settings. This is because when growing up with social media, they are not put into social situations leaving them anxious about them, in some situations even outright avoiding them as a whole.

Although I agree with these ideas of social media’s creating of blown out-of-proportion beauty standards and causing anxiety, I don’t think it’s social media’s fault. I believe that both of these things are caused by our lack of compassion and empathy as human beings. We can’t put someone else up without putting another down and this is a huge cause of the problems supposedly arising from social media. I believe that as we grow as a society and become more in tune with technology, we will transform our current idea of social media as we mature and it will be used for good.

“INTERNET” by fisakov is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

“We love Internet” by Kalexanderson is licensed under CC BY 2.0.