Social media is great. It allows us to easily share ideas, express ourselves, and collaborate with people worldwide with the touch of a button. We are living through a social media revolution in which cyber culture plays a massive role in how we think and communicate with our peers. This stuff will be in our grandchildren’s history books, and that’s pretty cool. But amid all the new technology and ways of communicating, are we relying too heavily on social media to speak for us?
It’s no secret that millennials are obsessed with sharing their lives through social media. Snapchat stories showing every tiny detail of our days are crucial, and our Instagram feed must be filled with depictions of our super-candid, fun-filled weekends, packed with power points and peace signs (yes, I know I am 100 percent guilty of this myself). We expect these highlight reels to communicate our kick-ass lives to our peers, so who cares if we actually talk to people about them?
While it is easy to point out how we expect our social media accounts to portray all the good things we have going on, it is the passive-aggressive nature of social media that is not always so easy to spot. "I’m not liking that picture because they’re awful and don’t deserve another like, " we say. "Can I check out that profile? I need to make sure they aren’t posting pictures with the wrong people" (followed by a week of anger directed their way when something less than satisfactory is spotted on their feed, all reasons for our negativity, unbeknownst to them).
Does that sound familiar? Even more worryingly, Facebook may be making these passive-aggressive actions even more accessible to us. NBC reported that Mark Zuckerberg has recently announced that Facebook has started to test alternatives to the "like" button.
Does this mean a “dislike” button is in our future? Possibly. Hopefully, this will not become a way for us to show our disdain for people and what they post, but rather a way to express condolences for upsetting news. There is no release date for this impending update, but we might as well brace ourselves now for the millions of tweets we will see about it in the future.
Dislikes aside, our generation must put more effort into speaking for ourselves versus allowing our social media accounts to do it for us. Some say a picture (or maybe the right emoji) speaks a thousand words, but what use are those words if we can’t communicate them ourselves? Besides, being passive-aggressive is obnoxious enough in real life.
I will never be anti-social media, but I will always promote speaking for yourself and not allowing social media to place millennials into the “can’t communicate with real people” category. We all know we can rise above that.
