It’s difficult to live your life now without proving that you’re doing it properly by posting every move on social media. We all moan about it, we all cringe at other people’s posts, and we’re all just as guilty for doing it. Heck, I can’t remember the last time I had a cuddle with my dog and didn’t post it as my Snapchat Story, Instagram Story and on my Instagram Feed.
The thing is though; do any of us really care about other people’s day-to-day activities? Of course we want to see what our best friends are doing on their gap yah’s, what emotional memes our mum’s are posting because they “share because they love their daughter”, what incoherent comments our grandparents are posting on our friends mum’s doctor’s facebook wall asking how the kids are, and even the obnoxiously large meal that one skinny girl is claiming to eat while you writhe with jealousy because you’ve just put four pounds on looking at it and she’s still a size 8 angel.
But do we really care? The truth is – yes, we do.
We care because we want to know that we are living life as well as everybody else. In the world of social media, if you’re not posting fancy cocktails/lip-syncing videos with your pals/pictures of your steering wheel while driving – might I add, very fucking dangerous – then you’re not doing anything remotely enjoyable because you’re not flaunting it. We all want our peers to know that we are living a happy and fulfilled life, but is our narcissistic desire to flaunt our activities to the people we don’t really know outside of Facebook turning our real-life relationships into little more than a social puppet show?
In previous years, I’ve been for meals with groups of friends and not had a single conversation with any more depth than “have you seen so and so’s new car?” while languidly turning their phone around to show me the new wheels of somebody I’ve only ever seen on someone else’s news feed. However, I look on my Facebook feed after returning home and there are countless posts on how perfectly loquacious we’d been: “had the best lunch with my girls, haven’t laughed so much in ages xxxxxx #bestfriends #lunching #dayout”. When in reality, what they should have posted should have been something like this: “sat at a table for two hours on my phone posting about how much fun I was having rather than actually speaking #facebooksimportant #lookhowmuchfunimhaving #legitfriendshiprighthere #dontbelievemelookheresapictureofmyfood #ilaughedatapictureofacatfor2.5seconds”.
I’ve even seen young, attractive couples dolled up to the nines for a romantic evening in a beautiful restaurant with their phones so close to their face their corneas had their own keyboard. The majority of their evening dominated by taking 15 different pictures of each course, (if they’re lucky, they might even get their other half’s fancy watch in it), checking to see how many likes it had, and messaging their group chat about a football game or the last episode of Pretty Little Liars – before paying a bill of £85 for merely advertising the restaurant with a million hashtags of #datenight followed by a detailed description of each course.
Before I go too far in preaching holier than thou: I am guilty for it. Anybody who has me on any social media site will know that I am regularly posting pictures of my dog, plugs for my blog posts, and even the occasional selfie if my brow game is on point – but chances are I’m sitting in my pants eating peanut butter out of the jar so there is nobody there to neglect except for my own self-worth.
I spend a lot of time at home by the fire, I wear pyjamas more than actual clothes and I very rarely go out on the lash because my pathetic little liver will punish me before I’ve even left the house; but regardless of how content I am with being an eternally sleepy and anti-social hermit, I still envy the girls I see on weekends away with their boyfriends, or lunching with their best friend, or driving their sexy new wheels, and it makes my life appear to be that little bit less adequate. This compulsive desire to post monotonous hashtags to appear remotely interesting to others is not only making us envy the photographers of the better Instagram posts, but neglect the blessings that we already have.
Over the years, social media has developed from a convenient place to store photo’s and share your holidays with the family members you can’t be bothered to call, into a momentous, pansophical entity that thrives on our curiosity into the lives of strangers and our ignorance to the family sitting right next to us. Facebook, Snapchat, Skype and even Tinder mean we no longer have to venture outside of our house to socialise with anybody more than a few feet away, and this is our way of developing and maintaining a mountain of new relationships (yet often disposable).
It has its blessings of course, it means I can see my oldest friends bringing up their children, I can keep contact with friends I was once close with and know that we can still meet up if we want to, and I can get new make up tekkers by watching complete strangers pull stupid faces into a camera while blending their foundation and blinking too many times.
But it also means that we miss the important things. We can neglect our friends who are trying to talk to us about something important, we can lose days with our grandparents who just want to have a good old-fashioned conversation, and we can miss a movie revelation that is critical to the storyline so we end up pissing everyone off by asking why Gerard Butler looks like he’s just smelled a nasty fart.
I guess we need balance in every element of our lives, and this is one of them. The world won’t suddenly become a buzzing euphoria of flash mobs and conversations with strangers on public transport because some opinionated 23-year-old decided to rant about one time she went for dinner and didn’t get much attention, but if we all manage to find that balance somewhere within our own reason, then maybe, just maybe, technology won’t fully take over the world.
I doubt it though.
No comments:
Post a Comment