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Listen up fellow Facebook friends, Snapchat swarm, Twitter tribe, LinkedIn lookers and Instagram inhabitants. Social media and our self-worth is an important topic for most people in 2019 (excluding my lovely father who still refers to Facebook as \u2018The Pagebook\u2019). So what is social media doing to our society?<\/p>\n
Our day-to-day lives seem to revolve around social media use, from optimal Instagram photo posting times to companies promoting their business through Snapchat filters. Logging onto Facebook can often feel like a game of emotional roulette. When I open my feed I am – more often than not – bombarded by streams of endless celebratory posts from my Facebook friends. Whether this is getting a new job, getting engaged, or getting an article published in the Telegraph; everything reminds me of just how stagnant my life seems to have become. I feel like an extremely average student who will barely scrape through my first year of university.<\/p>\n
Social media platforms like Facebook began as a way of sharing everything, from new song lyrics\u00a0to a delicious meal at a fancy restaurant. It allowed people from all over the world to connect by sharing their lives. In the past decade or so, it has since evolved into a platform exclusively for sharing the most intimate, remarkable and meaningful moments of our lives. This is not only because we feel a strong urge to post content that will gain us numerous likes, but also because we know that many others may be looking at our page – from employers to exes – so we feel as though we have to impress.<\/p>\n
Social networking has changed from sharing everyday moments e.g. what you had for breakfast to instead beautifying and amplifying life\u2019s big moments. We use image crafting (we\u2019re all guilty of a cheeky filter), or the process of posting deceptively exciting and beautifully staged photos to portray a seemingly perfect life on social media. I mean seriously, how do so many couples get these cute candid photos all of a sudden?<\/p>\n
I\u2019m not saying that knowing this means we can stop comparing ourselves. We can try to, of course, but it is, after all, a natural human instinct to judge our success in life by seeing how we match up against others. However, we need to realise that in an age preoccupied with social media, we are now comparing ourselves to a perfectly crafted and sometimes exaggerated representation of people\u2019s lives. We don\u2019t see the engagement ring that doesn\u2019t actually fit, or the fight that took place before the totally adorable couple went hiking in the Himalayas. As a result, we risk comparing our seemingly<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0ordinary lives with ones that seem thrilling and ever-changing, leaving us feeling inferior.<\/p>\n