LET'S TALK | SOCIAL MEDIA

Even though I entered the world of social media quite late, I still remember it being clean from big corporation's commercials and what are now the so-called online influencers. Social media was pretty much just a group of online platforms used with the purpose of sharing genuine content that would ultimately make you feel a part of a community with the same interests as you.

If magazines, tv and radio are a one-way type of channel, social media completely change that and, with a blink of an eye, brought voice to the audience. Nowadays, we no longer have to just consume content, but we can also share our thoughts on it with the world.

No matter how great that may sound, and even though I am not blaming social media itself for this, it has definitely brought some negative consequences along.

I bet we've all felt at some point or another that we're spending too much of our daily hours scrolling through social media and interacting in real life a lot less than we used to. Well, I personally did anyway and that led me to feel extremely bored and somewhat frustrated, to be honest. I kind of miss the early days of social media where there weren't really any second intentions behind a post and everyone was doing their own thing opposed to trying to all create the same type of content for the views and likes, as much as I miss feeling butterflies in my tummy whenever making eye contact with strangers instead of feeling completely alone in a room full of people who are just looking at their phones.

The business side of Social Media

From the moment that big corporations realized the impact that advertisement via online influencers have in sales, especially when compared to the more traditional mediums, that's when things started to go ugly. For me as a social media consumer and content creator, anyways.

We're living in a generation where we praise more other people's actual experiences and preferences than media advertisements and with that, big corporations are taking advantage and creating hidden advertisements all over the place.

Because social media and blogging are seen as an easy way of income, every day there are more people creating this type of content. Content that not only they do not believe in, it is not unique or even worse it is not true. Spreading incorrect information across the world, especially when you have a large following can be a very irresponsible thing to do and unfortunately we see that happening more and more with this huge burst of influencers that are on it just for the money and do not actually invest time searching for trustworthy information before raving about a product, diet, lifestyle or even beliefs that directly affect public health aka vaccines.

Ever since I changed my Instagram account to a business account, endless have been the emails I received from agencies and companies proposing services such as increasing my following, reaching more people, etc. I understand that this may even seem tempting to some who are in it for the money/popularity. But it is not my thing at all, and being confronted with this small part of the reality behind so many blogs and social media accounts gets me a bit discouraged at times. It is one thing when you are sharing something that you truly believe in or that you actually enjoy, but it becomes so clear, no matter the efforts, when it's being done just for the money.

Of course, there's nothing wrong with earning money from advertisement, but then we should call things for their names instead of disguising it, otherwise, it just creates mistrust and put us all in the same sack. Apart from that, it also creates a massive saturation and with that, of course people will eventually start to loose interest anyways.

Social Media can be a very powerful tool

We start being compared to each other as early as when we enter the school system. And, even though that may work well for some, when taken with measures, the fact is that it can easily lead us to fall into this pit hole of self-doubt and imposture syndrome. Well, I speak for myself anyway.

It is obvious that everyone wants to share the best parts of their lives on social media because at the end of the day it is like a photo album where we only want to keep the good stuff in. Makes sense, right. However, once everyone is so focused on creating something just for the view/likes, it loses its genuinely and personal touch, doesn't it? Ultimately, it becomes superficial and uninteresting. Especially when you consider the number of people using social media nowadays.

Everyone is responsible for what they're sharing online, but seeing most people posting so liberally about their private lives, like which flight they're taking, where they're at, with whom they're and so on, can make us feel tempted to do the same thing without thinking twice just for the purpose of belonging. I'm sure we all have our regrets when it comes to something we've shared online, especially after being confronted with the massive data crossing that there is between apps, websites and companies. We might as well be giving our privacy away in a silver plate these days.

I cannot deny that social media plays a very important role in three main pros - to spread awareness in an efficient way, the facility that we have nowadays to find people all over the world with the same interests as us, and, because we can connect with anyone anywhere, we can also learn a lot from different cultures from a personal point of view.

However, because everyone has access to this medium, logically we're bound to encounter people with all sorts of different purposes. In one minute we may be discussing and learning something with an educated person, and in the next minute we are disputing our point of view with someone with no background education on the subject and that doesn't even bother considering your words as a possibility.

As many of you noticed, I spent a good hand full of months away from social media and the internet world in general. The truth is that I, like many people, wasn't feeling inspired at all. I felt as if everything I was trying to create was just another drop lost in the ocean, it brought nothing new. I was not happy with what I was creating because I was not feeling good about myself nor the content I was consuming. It took me a while to understand the reasons behind it, being one of them, the importance I was giving to social media. I needed to take a step back away from all the cafe-lattes in the trendiest coffee-shops and the healthy brunch avocado on toasts with unicorns on top to recollect myself and my thoughts. I reached a point where opening any social media platform became extremely boring and I felt like I did not want to take part in that.

It's been almost a year now since I closed most of my social media accounts and honestly, if it wasn't a way for more people to get to know my blog and for me to get a more direct contact with you, I wouldn't even think twice these days before shutting down my Instagram account as well. Because no matter how great it may be at times, the truth is that I am just a bit tired of it, especially since the algorithm changed and I find myself seeing the same photos with two days old over and over again and missing out on others that I wanted to see.

I know that some of you may not relate to what I'm saying, especially if you have social media accounts just for the sake of it - Go you! However, when you use it as a way of exposing/promoting your work or if you follow accounts in a specific niche like fashion and beauty, you may start seeing things a bit differently.

Perhaps I've outgrown it or am just simply overwhelmed. Perhaps I'm just in need of a fresh new social media platform that is clean from all of these overly produced contents, or even to just close all my accounts once and for all.Who knows?

Anyway, we've reached the end of my rambling. Let me know what you think about this subject.