Yesterday I travelled on the bus and looking round me I could see six people all on their phones tapping away, lost in their own little worlds.
From where I was sitting I could see four of the screens and all of them were on either Twitter or Facebook. In their minds they were communicating with friends, catching up on the latest rumours or perhaps just passing the time on the bus.
In my mind this showed to me that for many their whole life often revolves around social media. It’s their way to communicate. Instead of making a phone call at some stage and having a chat to another person they instead broadcast their activities to all who are happy to read their posts.
Recently somebody said to me that they had over 200 friends on social media, I asked them how many of those 200 they had actually met? Their answer was if I remember correctly less than five, and those were people they actually worked with. So in that case how can they call the others friends? They don’t know them, they don’t know even if they exist, they could in some cases be figments of some persons imagination.
When I used to do day courses on computer safety on-line for young people I used to tell them the following. The internet is full of 14 year old boys pretending to be 18 year old girls talking to 14 year old girls pretending to be 18 year old boys. That is as true today as it was then.
There is more to life than following postings of people you don’t know and hanging onto their every post. People need to realise that many famous people on social media often have staff to do the posts for them, whilst many do their own posts many don’t, and they sure as hell don’t read all the responses from their so called followers.
Now I must state here that I have both Facebook and Twitter accounts, but I rarely use them. To be perfectly honest they bore me, they are similar to throwing a pound coin in a septic tank. You have to wade through gallons of crap just to find one little thing worth having. People often almost drown themselves in social media just on the chance they may come across something interesting.
There is something people don’t think about on social media and it’s the same as in real life “SOMETIMES PEOPLE LIE!!!” It’s a fact of life, people sometimes tell porkies, they bend the truth and in some cases tie it in a knot. But some people treat stuff they read on social media as the gospel truth. I heard somebody once tell the person they were travelling with on the bus about something they had read on Facebook, the friend questioned the accuracy of the statement and the answer she got was “Well it must be true because they put it on their Facebook page.”
In all fairness I will agree that a lot of lonely people get enjoyment out of social media, but equally a lot of people are lacking real live breathing friends, mates if you like because of the time they spend on social media.
So what are your thoughts, do you use social media, do you like social media? If so do you agree or disagree with what I have written?