The Pressure to Socialize Online
Lately, social media and its benefits and costs have been on my mind. This most likely has something to do with the fact that I am a communication major and right now, social media is THE big thing in the realm of communication. However, it seems more at the forefront of my mind than ever before. Of course I have always been a member of some social media site ever since my cousin made me a MySpace when I was 13.
Although, since then social media and its various uses have grown and transformed and morphed into useful business tools of the modern marketing era. So, the question that has inhabited my brain for the past couple of weeks is how useful is social media really and why is it so important?
In one of my classes (not the one that requires me to post on this blog) we are required to write a scholarly research paper in a group. We get to choose our own topics and group members. Immediately when my group met we gravitated towards topics related to social media. When we asked ourselves why we were so obsessed with the idea the conversation got a little interesting. We discovered that each of us felt an immense pressure from our professors and career center staff to be active on a variety of different social media sites. For example, all of us had one common experience. When we went in on our own separate occasions to the career center to inquire about internship opportunities, we were all asked the same series of questions: Which social media sites are you on? Do you have a Twitter? Are you familiar with Reddit? Do you know how to use WordPress?
It became clear to us that there exists this ever-present pressure to be proficient at using these social media sites. Of course from there we talked about why this pressure exists. Social Media is new and every day it seems like someone else is finding a new way to utilize it to track and promote a brand or business, manage customer relations, and create campaigns for a product or person or company that accomplish the one goal in our consumerist society: selling. Because that is what social media has become: another tool to sell an idea or service or product and to track these sales and mediate these sales.
So what my group arrived at when we had finished exploring these questions about social media was that while it clearly has benefits as far as getting a job out of college and helping businesses as a marketing tool, the pressure to use social media is so powerful that younger and younger people are using it for the wrong reasons. These wrong reasons may include embarrassing pictures, drunken tweets, and Facebook messaging when supposed to be studying. However, because students like myself feel this overbearing pressure to be on social media to see what’s happening and who’s who that we find ourselves using it incorrectly. We blindly stumble through making our profiles and adding pictures and posts because we feel we have to and maybe it’s not helping us but only hurting us in the long run.
I’d be curious to see if other students or just those of the general population felt the same way. Does this pressure exists outside of my own experiences and those of my classmates’?