The Dark Truth About Social Media

It shouldn't be news to most people that social media is toxic and probably the most popular and widest spread addiction in todays time. It isn't the true representation of someone's life but rather filtered, altered, photoshopped, planned out and straight out staged. An instagram of someone, for instance, is always sunshine,smiles, glory, luster, luxury and nothing but the brightest moments. If posing for a post young girls go in the most uncomfortable and quite frankly very awkward positions to catch the best angle of themselves no matter how unnatural and absurd they look. So it 's not surprising that a detox from social media is healthy and in my humble opinion it has become a necessity to stay sane in all this social media insanity that took over our world.

But even though I already have this strong opinion about social media this month it struck me how dangerous and destructive it truly is. I saw a couple of videos and read some articles about Mark Zuckerberg and the last Facebook scandal. I didn't think I would learn anything new. They said how social media can cause depression and isolation and how it over all just makes you feel less satisfied with yourself and your life. I already knew these things although I keep supressing them and try to ignore them myself to be completely real with you.
What hit me was when the first president of Facebook, an early Facebook developer and other ex-employees spoke up and blatantly said what social media is and what it really does.

 "It is ripping apart the social fabric of how society works. "

They have the intention to psychologically manipulate us and to give them as much of our time as possible. They want to consume as much of our time and conscious attention as they can and to make us stay longer on the platforms they give us Dopamin hits. They do that through notifications when someone liked our pictures or commented on them etc.  If we receive such positive feedback we are likely to linger around for longer and to post more content, probably even more frequent.

 

"You are exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology."

We are programmed. We are manipulated. We are willingly giving the internet hours of our precious time on earth that we will never get back. Every.Single.Day. 

They openly admit that they were aware of it, from the start, even if only in the back of their minds, of what they were doing. They understood the dark side that could come with it. And they did it anyway. Early social media developers knew the risk about what they were creating but brought it to life nontheless.
They now name social media a beast.

"If you feed the beast, the beast will destroy you.

If you push back on it, we have a chance to control it and rein it in."

They advice us to heartbreak from these tools that we came to rely on. To let go of them. 
If a former employee, a developer of the first big social media platform speaks so loudly against it, if they make such a turn and don't even use it anymore themselves... how much bolder can the statement get? They advice us to stop using it. To say goodbye to it.  To basically bury it. We need to take this seriously.  I really believe that we can use to be a little scared after knowing all this. We should be scared. And we need to change how we use these tools and seriously consider if we want to use them at all.

Did you know that constantly checking your phone (because you know, there is the possibility that you received a message or a notification) decreases your concentration level drastically over time? Our phone are like slot machines. And we are addicted.

"It's not the enemy,
it's just a reflection of our own free will."

After all it is our choice if we use social media and how we use it. No one forces us. At this point...no I'm kidding (not really). We need to ask us what is the longterm of the shortterm effect of too much information.

Social media today is not comparable to how it was when Facebook was founded.  It went out of hand. It is no longer just an hour or two that we are logged in. We are constantly online. Many people never even log out of their account even if they're not active. We are depending on it to entertain us and to make us happy. When I think about my life ten to fifteen years ago and how social media didn't exist, how happy and content I was, how everything was so much more real, I get extremly nostalgic and sad.

There is this article about why Gossip Girl is still a popular TV show after over ten years it first aired. Teenagers still love and identify themselves with the characters and the storyline. Back then social media didn't exist like it does today.
You know how I see it? Watching a TV show like Gossip Girl is still a better influence than social media. It is even more realistic. The scenery of an episode can more likely happen in real life than a staged and sponsored instagram post. Yeah, see how far we've come?
Gossip Girl is still entertaining without the mentioning of social media because social media doesn't matter. It might be seen as an useful tool to connect and grow a business to some. But that doesn't overshadow the fact that for the average person it is more poisoning than fruitful.
Social media is fake. It is irrelevant.

I'm sorry to be this direct and loud...or actually I'm not. It is the truth.  So I will finish this blogpost with nothing but the truth.

Social media doesn't matter. It is fake and irrelevant.
And to me it is cancelled.