THE ONE & ONLY: SOCIAL MEDIA

 - Rishika

 

The line between what is right and what is wrong is blurring out so fast, that sometimes we all feel like we should stop thinking at all. I guess we can thank social media for it, for how it has successfully ruined our minds— not just in terms of having opinions, but also how to dress, how to eat, sit, sleep, study, smile, cry and what not. It has doomed our brain, causing attention problems, following trends, doing vulgar stuff, using curse words on every occasion etc., etc. Our generation (and the ones following us) majorly had their social media accounts set at an early age. The age when our judgmental skills haven’t properly developed, when we were yet to discover about the do’s and don’t’s in the vast world of the internet. At the present day, there are multiple sessions happening in schools and online warning kids and teenagers about the impacts of social media, but if we could go back just 5-6 years, there was nobody really to help us. And that is where everything started to go downhill.

Back when lockdown started, and we were locked up in our houses, social media was the one that helped us stay connected with each other. I was 13 or 14 when I had my instagram account set up. All I wanted was to talk to my friends and know about their whereabouts, since we couldn’t go to school or tuition anymore. But nobody told me that instagram was not just a place to connect with people, it’s also a place where your dignity, your looks, your everything gets sliced and examined. Where if you don’t act like others you will be disregarded, left out all alone. To be honest, all social media ever gave me was a bunch of insecurities that I didn’t know I had. I mean, I can bet if lockdown never happened, if we were never meant to have social media, my insecurities would drown me so much as it did when I had instagram. “You should pose for a picture like this”, “you should smile like that”, “you should wear clothes like them”, “you should listen to that kind of music to be cool”— all these efforts just to gain a handful of hearts, and comments and probably 2-3 followers. If you have less followers you’re not cool. If you dress like this way you’re not cool, if you stand that way you’re not cool. We left and reshaped ourselves so much because people online could say you look nice today, that we lost ourselves. In the process of trying to feel included, we excluded the part of ourselves, the parts that were originally ours, that made us, us. 

Does that mean it has no positive side? Of course it does. It helped people learn so much about different political issues and social injustices going around the world. Spread awareness about issues like climate change, animal testing, diseases etc. it also raised alarms about Gaza, Sudan Congo, among others. It did educate us about a lot of things, but it also made our thought processes rigged and dirty. Now even the 13 year olds use slang on the comment section that I myself learned about at 17. It's weird, it’s scary, it's dangerous and it is happening right now.

This article might seem a bit too childish to some of the readers, but one must understand it's also the truth. The truth about social media, the truth about the internet. We are so focused on our phones and laptops that we forget there exists a world outside our rectangular blue screen devices. There will be a day when all of us will be trapped into that miniature thing, our brain wired to its system. Before that happens, before we completely lose ourselves and let social media take power, we must try to get hold of us and touch some grass, literally.