How My Relationship With Social Media Has Changed
As a 27-year-old male, I have seen a lot of changes when it has come to social media and really the web in general. As a matter of fact, I pretty much grew up with social media from when I was a kid until now. I was probably part of one of the first generations of people to grow up with what we now know as social media. From, Twitter, to Facebook, Instagram, Google+ (if you remember that at all), Myspace, etc. And with the growing up with social media, my relationship with it has gone in many different directions. From flat out rejecting and resenting it, to loving it and spending all of my time on it, to where I am now with finally thinking that I have found a healthy spot in my life for social media. I feel that a lot of the new generation that is younger than me don’t really know what it is like to live without it and to be without it. So it has conditioned them to think that it is necessary to live a successful life. And as much as I do not agree with that, I do think that there is a place for social media so long as you have an understanding of yourself and what you are doing on social media.
One of my first and one of the first-ever modern social media networks to ever come out was Myspace. Before Myspace there was never a formal way of having a public profile to my knowledge. There were AOL chat rooms and things like that but nothing was like Myspace. I created a profile when I was 11 or 12 years old. With Myspace I was completely addicted to it. I would go on it whenever I had a computer in front of me. I would try to get on it at school, unfortunately for me, they had it blocked from the school network. I was so addicted though that I started to learn about proxy servers and other ways to get around the blocking of a website just so that I could get on it at school. It was a completely unhealthy obsession that I had. I would change my profile picture all the time, change the layout of my profile page, change my friend’s list so it looked good, and so on. It was not at all a way to live. And to state the obvious, I think I was way too young to be on Myspace like that. Your “Top Friends” were a talking point at school and people would ask, how come you removed someone from your top friend’s list. People would even take it as a way of you saying that you didn’t like them. Some very weird stuff to say the least. Even now with Facebook and Instagram, it is still a thing to report who you are in a relationship with or to post a picture with them and all of this other unnecessary information. But I will talk more about that later. Back to Myspace. So the obsession continued for a few years. I would check for messages all the time, try to find girls on Myspace, and message them instead of talking to them in person because I was too scared or shy of face-to-face interactions. A whole bunch of problems arose that I didn’t even realize were problems until finally looking back in hindsight years later. So fast forward a few years and in 2006 Facebook finally is available to the public. Most people have stopped using Myspace so I was pretty much off of it by that point.
In middle school, the talk of the town was Facebook now. I was 13 or 14 years old when I made my account. With Facebook, it started all over again with my addiction. Constantly on it, getting in trouble at school for accessing Facebook through a proxy server, getting in trouble at home because I was on it until 3, 4, or 5 in the morning messaging friends, or just messing with my profile, adding random friends. You name it, I was pretty much doing it. Not at all a healthy mentality for me to have. My Facebook addiction lasted all the way through high school. Until I dropped out because I was falling behind and did not want to repeat my senior year in high school and be embarrassed in front of my peers. I had so many “friends” on Facebook. I think it got up to about 700 or so people. Most of the people I didn’t even know or I didn’t know that well. Facebook was also constantly talked about in school. How many likes you got, your pictures, who you were friends with on it. It all followed me throughout middle school and high school. After I dropped out of high school I used Facebook to keep up with my “friends” from high school here and there. I was mostly off of it though for a couple of years. I was about 19 or 20 when I started to learn about Twitter and Instagram from influences on YouTube. Mostly I would just watch tech channels like Unbox Therapy or MKBHD and they would ask to be followed on those social media platforms. I don’t consider YouTube a social media outlet myself but I know some people do.
At the age of 19, I still had my Facebook account, although I wasn’t on it much. I started to see more and more things about Twitter and Instagram from my friends on Facebook when I was on it so I made accounts for both. Twitter and Instagram were my new addiction overnight. Back when Twitter first started I could only send tweets via text message. Twitter used to be known as “microblogging” at the time. Instagram was all about your looks so I would try to post things that were heavily filtered or just the good things I wanted people to see. I also started to follow some of my friends from High School on both of them. Silently judging others and trying to become popular. I would also follow celebrities. I would be following thousands of accounts of people that I didn’t know or didn’t know that I existed. I wasn’t popular and was discouraged from even continuing to trying after a few weeks. So I would be on and off again with it. This continued until my mid 20’s.
At 25 years of age, I finally started to look at what I was doing in life. I had a realization of what I was doing. So I just flat out deleted or deactivate all of my social media accounts. I thought social media was just not for me and that no one should be on it. This lasted for 2 years and I was not on it again until these last few months at the age of 27. I knew that once I did get back on it I could not be the same way that I was when I was younger so I started to “clean up” my social media. I started with Facebook. I ended up removing all of the “friends” that I never talked to. I went from about 800 “friends” to now only having 78 friends. Those 78 people are family and actual friends that I either talk to or I want to keep in contact with. Next was Twitter, I completely unfollowed everyone on Twitter and deleted all of the tweets that I had when I was younger. None of it was important. Just talking about my day and other unnecessary information. I wanted a fresh start. So on Twitter, I started to only follow people and things that I really cared about. Mostly tech, anime, art, and photography. I no longer followed any women on social media. That’s a blog post for another day though. Next was Instagram. I was never too addicted to it but it was still something that I needed to clean up because I was following a bunch of useless stuff. So I unfollowed everyone on there and also only followed things that I like or wanted to see. Which right now is only a few accounts. I also recently created a LinkedIn account because I am currently searching for a job and am wanting to have my experience out there so that I am able to find a suitable job and build connections on a more professional network.
What I have realized in all of this when it comes to social media, it is just a tool. And that tool is just a reflection of how I feel about myself and what I want to do with that tool. Social media can be toxic if you allow it to be. Just like anything else in excess can be unhealthy. For me, I had to find a way to use it in a constructive way and a way that is able to help others. I now use it to put out what I think is lacking in this world which is empathy for others and loving others for who they are. If I don’t have something nice or constructive to say I just don’t say it. My intentions are not to put anyone down or make others think I am better than anyone, or anything that is in an ill manner. My intentions are to show that we are all the same and that we need to work together in order to survive. And that is how my relationship with social media has changed over the years.
