By Hailey Rollheiser (Contributor) – Email
Print Edition: June 5, 2013
If you have fun with your friends but don’t upload a picture of it, did it really happen? These days, it seems like the answer is no.
We are the first generation with the opportunity to document our lives on the internet. Yet too many people are documenting the wrong kinds of things that will come back to haunt them in later years. Parents and schools need to inform children that it is not okay to post material online with the delusion of privacy. There is no privacy; it is completely public and will remain that way forever. Forever, as in when you are no longer stripping and sweating because you popped a Molly.
Social media itself is fairly new. Our rampant use of it is even newer. I’m predicting that in the future, there will be a whole new category of psychology and sociology revolving around social media. “Psychology of Social Media” is a class that I’d love to take.
Scroll down the comments on any popular Instagram account and you will find dozens of extremely brutal comments. By the way, the fact that Instagram comes up underlined in red on Word just shows how new it really is. In the future, it may be added as an acceptable word – like Twitter, which is not underlined. This frightens me.
People will write the most ruthless of comments on anything they see fit. People are taking out their insecurities in the form of bullying people they don’t even know, behind a computer screen. Why would someone feel the need to bully someone about a comment online?
I am disturbed by these highly unintelligent and belligerent comments. The rude comments on social media make it appear as though society is digressing. I say “as though” because I don’t have any empirical evidence. But in my opinion, society is digressing, and fast. I seriously lose faith in humanity every day.
I can’t stand the cyber bullying, bashing and drug promotion that I often see. The answer is stricter moderation. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and their counterparts need to invest more in their moderators. Users that say even one negative comment towards another user should be deleted automatically. Users that post photos of illegal activity should be banned and referred to the police. I realize that this may sound like a censorship. You may have the right to free speech, but I don’t think that includes acting like a vulgar, uneducated, uncivilized barbarian online.
My last pet peeve about social media is the way people portray themselves. I lead a fairly uneventful life according to my Facebook page. According to other peoples’ Facebook pages, they’re living large like rock stars. Some people create personas or alter egos for themselves. Things get confusing if I like the real-life version of a person but hate the online persona.
The only thing to do is to simply get off of social media. Disconnect from the websites that are causing you to re-evaluate your trust in humanity as a whole. There are plenty of much more productive hobbies.
A life without social media would be quite different. Yet we have lived without it. It’s the next generation who will not know what life was like without Facebook. It’s still possible to live without social media if you simply choose to delete your accounts. You risk not being as “connected with your friends and family,” which is really just a euphemism for not being up with the daily gossip of some of your friends and family but mostly just various people you’ve never talked to since high school.
