It’s Time to Live in the Real World

Maddison Beck

English 102

Lisa Bednar

17 November 2015

It’s Time to Live in the Real World

        I challenge you to walk into a restaurant or to walk through the mall and try to find someone who does not own a mobile device. In today’s society, that is merely impossible. Almost everyone has invested in a phone that allows him or her to connect with his or her peers. Even if you were to go over to a third world country, you will still find humans interacting with each other by using only their thumbs. With the rise in popularity of mobile devices and with social media taking over the Internet in the last few years, the two could be described as a perfect match. Social media being accessible on the go comes with both positive and negative effects on our individual behaviors as well as the way society acts as a whole. Even though social media has given a platform for worldwide connectivity and has provided instant information at our fingertips, there are many negative effects that social media has caused that the positive just cannot mask.    

        One of the biggest problems social media is creating is the destruction of our interpersonal social skills. While in public, instead of engaging in conversations with peers, many are locked into the cyber world. During face-to-face conversations the potential of an awkward silence is inevitable. Sometimes unintentionally, we immediately reach for our phones to void the silence; we have become too reliant on a device to suppress our true feelings.

        We can’t put all the blame on social media though. In-person communication has progressively decreased over the years. Well before the social media boom, in order to get a hold of someone you had to put a pen to paper and send a letter through the mail. Also, we were forced to get out of the house and walk to our neighbors if we wanted to simply ask a question. Doesn’t sound too simple. Jump forward a few years and the telephone was invented. Instead of wasting those precious minutes of yours walking across the street, we were able to dial a few numbers and get ahold of anyone in our phone book. What if that person wasn’t home? Well, soon enough came the invention of cellphones, which allowed us to have an easy form of communication on us at all times. Don’t have any cellular service? No problem because the idea of messaging over the Internet popped up and was utilized among people all around the world. In today’s age, there is rarely a place or time when we can’t get in touch with someone, unless you are under water or in the middle of the desert (which will probably be devised soon enough). As easy as this has made contacting our peers, we are loosing that sense of personal connection.

        Social media has also given us the power to create an illusion of our lives in which we decide exactly what it looks like, whether that be an accurate or inaccurate perception of our real selves. When we post online, we don’t put up pictures of our bad hair days, or post about how we went home after a long stressful day of work and cried ourselves to sleep, or of the rejection text we got from our crush. Instead, we post the happy and favorable events from our day, such as the flower the barista drew in our latte, or the wet sloppy kisses we received from our puppy when we walked in the door, or the 100 percent we received on the test we studied many days for. Everyone does it and without even noticing, we are unintentionally lying to everyone.

        With online dating becoming more and more popular, we base our relationships off of these fake on-line personas. We scroll though each other’s profiles and pictures and take note of which activities they take interest in, what clubs they may be involved in, and what they “look” like. We base our judgment strictly off of what this person has intended for us to perceive them as, which is not necessarily the reality. We don’t like something we see on-line? We judge them, put them to the side, and then potentially not give them the time of day in the future. All of this happens without ever having an actual in-person conversation with the individual. “This gives you the feeling of being a friend without having to put the actual work in to build a relationship” (Smarty).  

This leads into another huge problem: the comparisons of these false identities to our true selves. When we scroll through Facebook or twitter we constantly see how much good is happening to those around us; this pushes some buttons inside our mind making us question what we are doing with our lives. It is in our human nature to want to feel accepted and not judged by our peers. We thrive to receive acceptance and to achieve this we compare and change ourselves to fit in.

A great example of this comparison between false identities and our true selves is with the thin media models. A lot of these models have millions of followers who receive thousands and thousands of likes on pictures posted daily. We see these pictures and the attention these models receive and can’t help but wonder what it would be like to be this popular. We then begin to subconsciously compare our lives and our bodies to these models and eventually start to act on these thoughts. We go to the point of starvation in order to attain that “goal body”. We can’t help it; we are human and want the affirmation that we are just as beautiful and thin as these models. But that is the problem. What we don’t realize is that a lot of these models have that false identity created for them. These models and celebrities we follow online have access to personal trainers, personal assistants, stylist, nutritionists and anything else they could possibly want. They typically have photographers’ photo shop pictures to favor their image. It is a fake life, which we compare our real lives to; this in turn just leads to disappointment.