Social Media and the role it plays in self identity

Social media is, without a doubt, one of the most polarising inventions of our modern era. As someone who has grown up surrounded by technology and online interaction it seems almost impossible to imagine what life would be like without social media, which may seem shocking to people who grew up in the pre-internet age, but it’s true. Social media has been a constant presence in my life and the lives of other people my age, and it can definitely be argued that it has done more harm than good.

Social media is at its best when used a a simple tool for communicating with friends and family. To take the hassle of trying to keep in touch with people far away and make it so simple and accessible is a great innovation, however as technology advanced, social media did too. The social media we see and subject ourselves to these days is so much more than just a tool for keeping in touch.

Nowadays, social media is all about validation. It is no longer enough to just post a picture or send a tweet to let people know what you’re up to, now you have to constantly be impressing them. The constant need to appear ‘cool’ and attractive to everyone is no doubt damaging to our mental health, especially us younger people who’s brains are still not fully developed. The way we seek approval from our peers day after day is incredibly harmful to our mental state, as it is not good for us to be constantly seeking worthless validation in the form of meaningless “likes”.

Our overuse of filters, photo editing and manipulating are warping our perception of reality and ourselves. We can’t help but compare ourselves to others, and in the modern age the pictures we compare ourselves too are very rarely honest representations of how a person exists in the real world.

In addition to this, we create expectations of ourselves to live up to false ideals. The version of ourselves we present to the world through social media is never going to be a completely accurate representation of us due to social media’s very nature of sharing only the exciting, interesting highlights of your life. When viewing a person’s social media page you are not seeing an accurate reflection of that person’s life, you are seeing a carefully crafted and curated page designed to entice and inspire envy within its audience. It is called social ‘media’ after all, making the posts and accounts essentially media ’products’ with the specific goal of trying to convince everyone that the poster’s life is full of glamour, glory and vanity.

This is a vicious cycle. Unrealistic posts of people, places and things on social media create unrealistic expectations within the users viewing the content. They will begin to do the same as the accounts they follow, and their followers will do the same, and their followers will do the same, and it will go on forever until social media is a wasteland of stereotypes and false reflections of reality, and real, honest posts will be scarce.