A World without Social Media. by Lumi Tarhala.

 A World without Social Media                                 Lumi Tarhala - 3A - 2024 

Social media is a big part of everyone's lives, including mine, and has its advantages and disadvantages. It’s easy to compare the world with social media to one without it since it has only been around for a bit more than a decade. I conclude that people lived just fine before it, but I don’t think I could learn as many new things as I currently do, if I didn’t have social media or if it didn’t exist at all. 

It’s an efficient way to gain, as well as search for, information. Some people criticize getting information from social media and claim that the information is unreliable. However, I think the same thing can be said about all media, since all of it, books, news articles, letters, etc., are made by a person, or people, with a goal or an agenda in mind. Or by someone who does not fully comprehend the topic they’re talking about.  Personally, I’m on social media a lot and I get a lot of my information from there, so not having access to it would mean that I’d be unaware of the things going on beyond my active circle of family, friends and associates, and I wouldn’t be able to form my own opinions about a relevant topic, before everyone around me already knows about it. That could mean that I’d use more of my energy to focus on the events going on in my own life, but I’d have nothing equal to compare my life to, since social media is a place where I learn about other people’s lives. Therefore, I would be unsure of if my life is going as, it should be, and I’d also have a harder time understanding and dealing with different situations. 

Social media itself drives an agenda, the one that the owners of the companies have, which is to get people to use their apps as often and as much as possible. This leads to the most popular and talked about subjects to be ones that rile up people. I think it’s good to be passionate about things that you believe in, but social media has a tendency to create things to argue about and then escalate a small argument to be about the moral failings of the other side. Usually, I don’t engage in discourse by commenting or posting about it, but I do follow them and try to think critically about why people care in the first place. Since I’m not that tied up in it, I think I could go (and have gone) a few weeks without social media.

Social media by itself isn’t bad, but everything is bad if you overdo it. Overall, the best thing you can do is think about why a topic is being discussed before taking the arguments people make to heart.