My Social Media Evolution

I have a love/hate relationship with social media. I joined the role of social media once I got into middle school to stay in touch with my friends and everyone else in school. It started with MySpace where the creation of your profile was almost like your mini blog where you can decorate the layout, add photos and quotes and so on. It was a fever for everyone to get the hottest layout for your page. I would consider this a form of media making... or at least we thought it was. We were creating... for lack of a better word, our spaces on MySpace that depicted our personalities, or at least the persona we wanted to be. 

I dropped my account on MySpace shortly after my freshman year of high school and picked up Facebook. It saved us the time of having to make these creative layouts, making it simpler and more efficient to keep in touch with 'friends' on our accounts. Shortly after my freshman year of college, my Facebook got dropped too. I went on a hiatus from social media for about a year. I was done reading meaningless posts that I had no interest in. After this year I picked up Instagram. Even simpler than Facebook and MySpace combined. Pictures, pictures, and more pictures! Maybe it's because the people I follow have now matured, but it's a little less meaningless... just a little, and I find myself following amazing accounts that are about important social issues. One of my favorites is Humans of New York (Click the link). I literally get excited every time he posts something because it is always an inspiring story about a local New Yorker, a story that I sit and think about for a while, and a story that I share with people throughout the day that sparks great conversation. 

This becomes a shared mass media event when I get to tell people about this account, they follow it, and share the story on. This is what social media is all about! I fit events like these into my life because sometimes the posts on Humans of New York truly make my day and forces me to have a different perspective than the one I had when I woke up that morning.

But, like everything else in life it cannot all be perfect. Social media has its well known defects. One of them for me is comparing myself to certain images I see on the internet, more specifically Instagram. Although I and many other people are aware that everything is not always as it seems, you get a slight pang of envy when you see images of young people with a lot of money, traveling the world, shopping all the time, and basically living a care free life while you're at home on your phone scrolling on Instagram watching their lives. Thankfully, it does not take me long to snap back to reality and remember who I am. Looking around in this generation it is so easy to get lost in the media world, but I also see how easy it is to make great use of it. People that raise crazy amounts of money for a certain cause solely through a social media platform is now the norm. 

People that start events like this are the ones that we should be comparing ourselves against and say "why can't I change the world like they are?"