I have been fascinated with the social media phenomenon and the rise in social media use in our daily lives for as long as I can remember. This fascination with how much we use social media exists because I’m old enough (early 30’s) to remember a time where social media didn’t exist and we had to rely on face to face and telecommunication in order to interact with people. My childhood up until age 11 exclusively involved face to face communication or talking to friends over the phone. I vividly remember being in elementary school spending many hours with friends prank calling various other friends and business owners (we were kids okay). Sure we had computers when I was a kid but they were almost exclusively used for playing games like the Oregon Trail and Solitaire instead of using them for any social purpose. This was as far as we got with technology in the early 90’s.
Then the summer before the beginning of middle school happened and the world wide web, Windows 95 and AOL were introduced to the masses: And. That. Changed. Everything.
I still remember logging on to AOL right before the start of 6th grade and I remember hearing that awful login sound that defined the next seven years of my life. A whole new world opened up for me. Now I could talk to friends on the computer and “instant message them.” Sure the connection was slower than you can imagine (56 K!), you could only use the service with a landline phone and websites were very limited but it was still a whole new world and for a kid just starting his formative years, that was everything.
I thought it was so neat that I could talk to my friends on the computer in addition to calling them. Little did I know that I would eventually be able to meet people from all over the world through AOL’s chat rooms. My middle and high school years were defined by going on AOL (and dealing with the awful login sound and the slow internet connection) and talking to random people from all over the world. I often found myself in the Blink-182 chat room talking to various teenagers from all over the country. Looking back on this now, I have no clue if some of the kids I ended up talking to were actually my own age. The internet was still under a cloud of anonymity back then. You really had no way of knowing if you were talking to a 50 year old pedophile or a cute 16 year old girl. I just loved this new form of technology because it easily allowed me to meet kids with similar music tastes and other similar interests. I got into so many bands based on the friendships I formed during the AOL days.My exposure to the internet during my adolescent days is something I’ll always cherish for the reasons I mentioned above.That brings me to the present: 2016.
Social media and the digital world have taken off so much in the past 20 years that it’s hard to picture that there was a time when you had to deal with an awful screeching noise to access the internet. Most people have access to the internet at edge of their fingertips. You can easily access any website you want through a smartphone, a laptop or a tablet/I-Pad. The advancements in social media have also seen a similar rise over the past 20 years. Sites and apps like Facebook, Tumblr, Snapchat, Skype, Instagram and Twitter make it so easy to connect with people all over the world. It’s surreal to me how far we’ve come in the past 20 years. I love the influence social media has had on my life. Without the influence of social media in my life, this blog would not exist and I wouldn’t be able to connect to a good percentage of my current group of friends without Facebook. I also wouldn’t have discovered the amazing and incredible medium of Snapchat and gained a small following because of the content I post on Snapchat. This modern age of social media is incredible. Therein lies the problem with social media though: Even though it’s a great tool for connecting with friends you don’t get to see every day, we’re losing a lot of the face to face and personal communication skills because we’re always on social media.
Since it has become more prevalent, social media has made people have a tendency to want to interact with people online rather than in person because it has made the process simpler.The number of face-to-face interactions is not the only thing that has been negatively impacted. The quality of these decreasing interactions are suffering as well. People are not having these intimate conversations and personal interactions with each other anymore. People, instead, have turned to the Internet to take away some of the nervousness that some may find in trying to start a relationship with another person.
As someone who suffers from social anxiety, I’m pretty guilty of using social media as a crutch and I’m constantly on my phone texting someone or checking Facebook and/or Instagram when I’m feeling nervous in a social situation. I’m also the type of person that craves intimate conversations with people and so in a sense, constantly being on social media is not a good thing for me. Lately, I’ve been trying to decrease my time using my four preferred social networks (Facebook, Tumblr, Snapchat and Instagram) but I’ve found it very difficult because of the convenience factor. One helpful thing I have been doing for a couple of years now is just taking two hours out of my day to cut myself off of any digital communication and social media and do activities not involving social media. These activities usually involve exercising, taking a walk, catching up on Netflix shows or reading a book. Doing this helps clear my mind and gets me refocused after being behind a screen for most of the day.
I also marvel at those friends in my life whose lives are not dominated by social media. I know a handful of friends that rarely post any content on social media and usually only post information about important life events. Most of these friends are busy living their lives mostly free of being stuck on a phone or a computer and these friends are what I eventually strive to be.
While social media is great, take some time to communicate with your friends in person. Say hi to someone you’ve never met. Put your phone away at a large social gathering and talk to people. Sometimes these things might be difficult to do in this digital age (especially for those of you with social anxiety like myself) but you’ll be a better person for having more authentic conversations instead of constantly being on your phone or on social media.
Thoughts Of A 30-Something Human 
Goodness, I remember the AOL and AIM craze. I was quite sheltered as a child, so I did have my head in the sand when I was first introduced to AIM. I was close with a female cousin who was around the same age as me and I couldn’t understand why she would always want to talk to me on AIM. I would be happily playing with my Barbie dolls or cleaning my room on the weekend and she would IM my brother and ask him to tell me to come on AIM. But soon I turned to instant messaging as a way to communicate with others when my social anxiety grew more intense and hard to deal with. I became stunted with oral communication and often felt too scared to express my opinions or feelings verbally unless I was typing or writing it out.
I have mixed feelings about Facebook. At first, I felt I jumped on that bandwagon because I wanted to reconnect with friends I had lost touch with over the years. In some instances, I found profiles of my old grammar school mates and would message them. I soon stopped doing this after I began perceiving that too much time had passed and although these people remembered me, how could we be friends after all this time? I find the “friends” list to be not very accurate. I don’t think the list should be used to determine how active someone’s social life is. I only add people I either want to get to know better or consider friends. If they don’t fit in either category, I will delete them.
It’s also interesting the different perspectives some people have on Facebook. I honestly could not care how many “likes” I get on my own status or post update. My own mom seems to care about counting her “likes” for her posts though. I also have a friend, who is not American, and I was a bit floored when she personally asked me to “like” a photo she uploaded. I declined because I didn’t feel comfortable with the request, and she later told me she felt hurt at my rejection. She explained that, in her country, the idea of “liking” someone’s post is to show you care and are interested in the person’s life even if you haven’t seen the person in years. While in my opinion, I found it troubling she went as far as to ask me to like her photo, almost as if she was basing the depth of our friendship on whether I was paying attention to her on social media or not.
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