I was 18 years old when I opened my first social media account. I had grown up in a sort of impenetrable bubble, shielded from a lot of societal or otherwise secular influence, so social media was most definitely out of the question. Of course, there were other reasons why, and I understood that it was mostly for my protection. Still, I always wondered what it would be like, and I was glad when I found the perfect excuse to open an account. I was still living at home, under my parents' rules when I started attending college to study media and communication. One of my very first classes required me to study my own social media interactions, which was hard to do without a social media account. So, with studies on my side, I told my parents that I would need to open a Facebook account. Within a year, the rest of my family was on Facebook. Since then I've opened accounts across several social media platforms. I’ve seen various platforms come and go, while others have evolved. Someone somewhere is probably studying the trends and the evolution of social media within the past decade or so. As for me, I've been invited to give thought to social media's current place versus the right place and whether those are dichotomous.
I'll be considering this not through an academic lens, but through the lens of observation and personal experience. I do not necessarily have a ton of experience with social media. I am mostly a spectator in that realm. It might be said that social media was born of a need or a desire to connect with others, which may be true but not singularly so. In my observation and experience, people's personal motivation for the use of social media springs not only from a desire to connect with others but also from a deeper desire to be known. We share the things that make us proud, the things that make us laugh, the things that inspire and compel us, and we hope that it will resonate with someone, somewhere on the other end of our posts and our shares, and that when it does, we might feel a bit connected and a little known. I think that social media is an important tool that allows us to engage in this “knowing” and “connection”, but the fact is, that those connections are typically surface level, and they can only go so deep. With a bit of wisdom, we understand that social media is rendered useless in our hands if we do not understand its purpose. Social media alone cannot build or maintain relationships, which are the real space in which we connect and are known. People have to put in the time to interact with one another in person (in as much as it is possible) in order to build and maintain relationships. Social media has the potential to help us keep up with people more than with relationships. As of today, I have 1,254 Facebook friends. 66 of them posted on my timeline to wish me a Happy Birthday this past June. I have probably posted on the timelines of fewer than that. Of course, posting on my birthday is not the telltale sign of whether or not we really are friends. However, these numbers are a pretty decent representation of the number of people we connect with on social media versus the number of people we have real relationships with.
That doesn’t mean that I’m about to purge my account. I can honestly say that I care about my other Facebook friends. From my little corner of the world, I wish them well. I am happy for their good news and saddened by their bad news. I root for them and am happy for their successes. I may be more attentive to some than to others, but in some small way, I am invested in all of their lives. I so appreciate that social media affords me that opportunity.
There are other types of meaning and implications for social media, and how it allows us to engage. The great minds that shape and create social media platforms waste no time in monetizing our posts and our shares. But greater minds have figured out how to use social media to engage others for good. I have seen a social media fundraiser exceed it goal within 24 hours and provide a great help to those in need. I have seen a movement on social media mobilize activists and volunteers in the service of their communities. I have seen social media provide a safe space for important conversations that have the power to inform perspectives and develop understanding between the least likely participants. Social media can help to do so much good in the hands of people who care.
I think that oftentimes when we consider the place of social media today and the place where it should be, we think of all the ways that it furthers distance between people who are close enough to reach out to one another in real life and dissonance between people we could not otherwise reach to bring down. “Haters” and “trolls” are not the results of social media - they existed long before and they’ll exist long after. Social media is not the enabler of anyone who would use it to harm others. All the best or worst that social media can do depends entirely upon who uses it, and how they choose to do so. The functionality and reach of social media continue to expand, but the place of social media then and the place of social media now are not dichotomous - they are synonymous. Social media continues to be a tool for drawing people towards one another for deeper more meaningful real-life endeavors.