The daily advances of technology have brought everyone light years closer to obtaining information about everything. From recipes about a favourite dish to pictures of a cute dog and from the most recent natural disaster to a daily feed of what is going wrong with the world.
At a first glance, this is all well and good. However, what about the problems caused to those who consume all these?
One of the first things that one will hear from Social Media advocates is the argument for responsible usage and greater awareness when it comes to social media.
“It is not the tool but how you use it” But who taught us how to use it?
The initial inspiration for this article came from a video of Hang Green, who among other things has one of the longest carriers on Youtube (his and his brother’s channel provide its audience with videos almost since the creation of Youtube.)
Social Media is a part of a toolbox that we have developed. That toolbox allows us to communicate in ways like never before. Never before in the history of humankind, someone could pick up a device and connect with someone on the other side of the world in a matter of seconds. Never before we could open an app and learn how to do almost anything that we want.
In the last twenty years, the internet has lowered the barrier to communication and distribution of knowledge and made it so any idea can be amplified. Until now, one can argue that this sounds like a great thing, and to some extent it is. But, and there is a big but and I cannot lie.
We need to wonder “How new we are in all this?”, and “How little we knew before about such powerful tools?” The lack of answers to those questions has led us to several problems. Over the years, research has increasingly shown how social media is impacting the mental health of its users.
Anxiety, stress, and depression have been correlated with the daily use of Social Media. That brings little to no surprise to whoever has used a Social Media app for more than a day. Feelings that are often caused by comparing ourselves to the highlight reel of other people’s lives, measuring our worth on the number of likes or responses we get, feeling inadequate or FOMO. Even body dysmorphia and eating disorders are common results, especially for women that grew up looking for the perfect lives (and bodies) of other people – fuelled by filters, and Photoshop online.
No matter the way that someone can view Social Media and its effects on us, no one can argue that they are an extremely new technology. One of the most interesting points that Hank based the video on, is the question “what are we gonna think in 50 years looking back on our use of Social Media?”
He is using the argument that a combination of factors like the unhealthy use of social media by some or our inability to know how to handle these tools well will lead future generations to look back and be baffled by how badly we used them.