Samantha McGarry

Blog Post #7

4/23/15

How Does Social Media connect with our lives: Positives + Negatives

In this weeks class, we discussed the connections social media has on everyone’s lives. The class discussed the critical issues with social media and related it to the concepts we learned this past semester. This topic really got me to start thinking about the trivial idea of social media and life. Something Professor said stuck with me- ‘we are so stuck on capturing the moment rather than being in the moment.’ This got me thinking to how many moments I have missed because of snapchat, instagram, etc. and how hard it is to not contribute to the infinite space of social media.

I first started to think of the negative aspects to social media. I personally think it is very easy to think of the negative parts of social media. I also personally believe a lot of people “jump on this bandwagon” of trashing on and finding negative impacts of an overly popular social aspect. However, all is (usually) true. The first thing I thought about was the idea of missing the moment. Missing the moment made me think back to all the times I took out snapchat to capture what was going on around me. I started to think about why do I do this? Why is the first thing I think of when I am somewhere cool, or see something cool, is to take out my phone? I would love to say it is me and take full responsibility for my actions. However, I do not really think any individual can really take responsibility for a societal movement. Society has conformed so much to the idea of capturing the moment before anything that it almost seems impossible to break that trend.

Another thing that always bothers me is the idea of a “fake face”. What I mean by that is, the selfie of the girl who really does not look like that or the couple that looks so happy, however is nothing close to that in real life. I think this bothers me so much because it is true but also a really conversional topic. I have always been bothered by this negative aspect of social media because it almost shames the idea of putting pictures up of your partner and you because of all the “fake face” couples out there. I will expand on this when I talk about positives, but I think it’s healthy to want to show off how wonderful your partner is. I think it is okay to want to publicize the good in your relationship. However, I can see how publicizing can exploit a relationship and also show only one half of who someone really is.

Although there is a lot of social media negatives, there is also a lot of positives that tailor with it. Like I just mentioned, I think it is okay and good to share positive things happening in your life. I believe that gives people that care about you and do not always see you, a sense of security to check your Facebook and see you are doing well. However, a huge positive for me is the speed of spreading news. For example, the Boston Bombing. When the New England area, especially Massachusetts, was in distress, everyone had social media to keep information flowing. Although we were all on lock down, I was never locked out of the news and updates that were happening seconds before a twitter post was available. Things like these moments prove how any form of communication is essential, and during that time it was social media.

I feel like I will always have a war between the goods and evils of social media. Growing up in this time period has been completely different than my parents and social media is a contributing factor to that. However, I do believe there is more good than evils associated with the speed of effectiveness of social media that society looks passed.