Pretty much everyone out there has some form of social media. Whether it be Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, or whatever, almost everyone owns an account somewhere on a media platform (In fact, the BBC evidence article which I will reference in this blog, using italics, states that 40% of the world’s population uses social media). I’m not saying this is a bad thing, in fact most of my life revolves around social media (and that’s not just because I’m a teenager who mopes around all day), however the influence and pressure it has over our lives is perhaps not always a good thing, especially with recent studies showing a rise in mental health problems linked to social media.
Due to recently completing my education – where school and college is concerned – I’ve done a wipe out and drastically dropped the amount of time I spend of social media, mostly because I don’t need to use it to procrastinate completing my homework anymore, however I still use it on a daily basis.
I’m not going to pretend to know why it is we rely so much on social media, and why we take an interest in the lives of others, especially when it can complicate our own. But we do, even if we pretend we don’t, and just as much as we’re interested we also have a slight desire to show off. This means we also post a lot about our own lives (hello, I write blogs, this seems a little twisted and slightly hypocritical to talk about).
However, despite how much we use it, there is a pressure that comes with social media which I think is very negative. I feel it on an almost daily basis, especially when it comes to my author page on Instagram. For me it feels like a slight twist in my guts, as “Our feeds often resemble an endless stream of stress.”. It’s a twist that tells me I should post more to gain followers in hopes that more people will become aware of my books and will therefore want to read them. This in turn means my hopes of having a career in writing will become much more probable (if I ever get over this killer writer’s block).
The pressures of social media, I have to admit, doesn’t just concern increasing the readership of my books. It also concerns the pressure to be, to some extent, like my idols. This, granted, is as toxic as anything and really shouldn’t be something I feel, but it still is. I see photos or posts I like – bear in mind here that the main social networking platform I use in Instagram – and then want to recreate or apply them to myself. This mostly surrounds people with healthy lifestyles and leads to a jealously which is really intoxicating and can side-track me a lot from my own life along with the progress I’m trying to make with it. These posts are like little screams in my brain asking why I’m not like them and how I’m not good enough to be as successful as those around me. It also preys a lot on my insecurities (which I’m slowly trying to decrease the significance of) and can sometimes completely flip my mood – a.k.a. when grumpy Emily pops up to say hello.
Social media has also, to an extent, had an impact on my mental health. At the time, anyone who told me I was upset because of social media was wrong. I couldn’t see how much it was influencing my life, and how much it was dragging me down. But now that I’m better (at least most of the time), I can take a step back and think that actually, seeing everyone else enjoying their lives while I was so upset really did make the whole situation worse. Also, burying myself online – which was commonly what I would do, made me feel so much more alone. “A study in 2017 surveyed 7,000 19- to 32-year-olds and found that those who spend the most time on social media were twice as likely to report experiencing social isolation.” At this time in my life, social media only increased how I felt as though I had no one to turn to and increased how lost I believed I was.
think that the reason I can talk about this time of my life more openly now is because I know I’m not the only one to feel the pressures of social media. At some point in their life, I’m sure pretty much everyone will be negatively affected by social media and it can affect some people worse than others. There are so many mental health problems that can evolve or manifest as a result of social media – due to just generally browsing social media but also through lack of support, disrespect shown towards our view and beliefs (which usually concerns religion, race, disability, gender and sexuality – I remember learning about these ‘target’ groups for hate crime in my college Criminology course. It’s actually quite disgusting how horrible some people can be online), and cyberbullying.
I’m just now realising that this blog is taking a very negative turn. I’m not here to shit on social media, I just wanted to show how the pressures surrounding social media can, and has, made me feel terrible in the past, and how it continues to have such a negative impact on people lives.
Don’t get me wrong, despite the fact I sometimes want to, I’m not about to quit social media. In fact, I’ll be posting this blog on Blogspot, Facebook and Instagram. I rely on Social media far too much to stop using it. However, what I want is to care less about the pressure I feel from social media, and that I’m trying, slowly, to become my own person, rather than someone I feel the need to be.
In honour of this ‘risky’ blog post, I used BBC research to help back up some of the points I was making (because it felt like the right thing to do). The page I found the research on is linked at the top of my blog, and also here: http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20180104-is-social-media-bad-for-you-the-evidence-and-the-unknowns and is called “Is Social Media Bad For You, The Evidence And The Unknown”. The post was written on 5th January 2018, by Jessica Brown.
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