Do you need an advice, help or a tutorial? Do you want to know how the Nyungwe rainforest looks like without having to travel to Central Africa? Do you want to know which restaurant you should choose for your next date?
All these questions can be answered by just one click on your phone or computer. One click and you’ll know more than you expected. Or even more, than you actually wanted. In any case, the searcher will be wiser than before.
Social media is more than an encyclopedia or a social network. To put it more precisely, it is a new lifestyle, which defines new occupational fields. For others, it is just a hobby or a pleasant pastime, basically a whole new or rather a different world.
You can be a fighter in the virtual game world, a cook on Youtube, or even a stalker on Facebook, you can be whatever you want: there are actually no borders. To be honest – it is an awesome feeling to know the local conditions of the Nyungwe Forest without having been there even once before, just by googling it.
But if you ignore this feeling for one second, you may discover what really is underneath this social media world.
Firstly, there are incredible varieties of communities and brands, which benefit people who spend more than a third of their walking day consuming social media[1]. In this way, the social media is able to influence our consumer behavior, our tastes, and even our thoughts. It has become the center of influencing and managing others.
By joining social media, industries fulfill their marketing strategy. By contrast, people fulfill their need for belonging and their need for cognition with those who have shared norms, values and interests[2]. But this connecting of people worldwide involves an absence of physical co-presence. In this case, social media shows us a close resemblance to psychoactive substances, such as coffee, alcohol or other addictive substances. A daily drug, enabling to escape.
It is for us to decide whether we want to live in a world, which is controlled by others or not. It is up to everyone of us to resist the mankind’s biggest weakness and to discover the beautiful world beyond social media. Learn to appreciate the usual world–here and now.
By Alev Mengi
[1] https://spectrum.library.concordia.ca/974513/1/CHB-Effects_of_Social_Media_Based_Brand_ Communities-Aprl20.pdf [2] Gangadharbhatla, 2008; Tardini & Cantoni, 2005)