Social Media Implications: a Zoomer’s Perspective
Social media is possibly one of the most controversial inventions of the past decades. We have come to a time in which our TVs are watching us, our books are reading our eyes and our smartphones are listening to us. Every hour, minute, and instance of our lives. And that includes social media.
Having started with the vision of connecting people from all over the world in one place, Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook — the most popular social media platform as of this year— in February of 2004.
To date, there exists a variety of opinions on the topic. Some people cherish the possibility of communicating with others who are hundreds of kilometers away or catching up with friends and family who have been away for a long while. Others are truly scared of how this new piece of software could impact their privacy.
Indeed, privacy is the keyword in this discussion. A recent study shows that roughly half of Americans don’t trust social media to protect their data. But what exactly are people afraid of?
Well, it turns out that social media companies aren’t non-profits. In other words, they need to make money somehow, in order to continue connecting the world. This is achieved through advertising.
Advertisements — or ads for short — are the digital version of TV infomercials, street, or newspaper advertisements. However, in contrast to these, social media advertising is personalized to each user. This is what users may be worried about.
Even if you don’t follow CocaCola on Instagram, by scrolling down your feed, you may find lots of posts that promote their products.
Still, why does this happen? How exactly does Instagram know that I like CocaCola?
Surprisingly, a great part of social media users don’t know this even though they agreed with those terms from the very first moment they created their accounts. Messages like “By creating an account you agree with the terms and policies of Facebook” or “Allow Instagram to access the camera, microphone, and photos” are sometimes overlooked, but are the answer to why Facebook knows whether you like beauty products or not.
In any case, the question remains: if social media takes so much of its users’ privacy away, why in the world should the youngest souls be exposed to such a blasphemy?
From the point of view of a young person living in the 21st century, social media is here to stay. It all started with The Facebook but as most innovations, it will continue to be transformed as other trends come to place.
Paraphrasing Yuval Noah Harari’s ideas, in the end, it all comes to whether you use your cellphone or your cellphone uses you. Whether social media is a service that you use, or your information is a product that social media sells to third parties.
Soon, algorithms could know ourselves better than we do. Not only by listening to your conversations but also by getting more personal data like our genome or biometrics.
In this sense, — as in many aspects of our lives — it’s not a matter of whether we should do it or not. But how we do it.
During these “COVID days” when there is almost no better way of interacting with others, social media not only becomes an option but a solution and even a necessity.
Certainly, this isn’t only true for adults. Children need to continue talking, playing, and learning with their peers.
Thus, we should address this issue by teaching kids how to use social media correctly, in order to protect their privacy as much as possible and manage screen time, instead of restricting its use to later find out that they already have thousands of followers.
To sum up, social media can be thought of as a tool. This tool isn’t good or bad, but it can be used in many different ways and thus, lead to different outcomes.
Lorena, a 13-year-old Mexican girl, says her experience with social media has been a little complex. “At first, I was only curious to see how I could connect with other people around the world by posting photos I took of nature. Then I started to pay closer attention to what my friends and classmates posted, how many followers and likes they had. I realized I wasn’t doing things right and that I didn’t have those many followers so I started to dedicate more time to it. Selfies, selfies, and more selfies until getting the perfect shot. That’s the way it needs to be”.
Lorena is only one of the millions of teenagers around the world who have discovered another way of interacting with the world through social media. What she is concerned about isn’t her privacy, since she already knows the basic rules when talking to “strangers” and posting on social media. What Lorena worries about is how much time she spends scrolling down her Instagram feed, and the habit she has developed of checking her home screen every ten minutes looking for new notifications.
When asking my classmates for their definition of social media, the most common answer is “the way you interact with others outside school”. An answer given by my friends on Twitter is “a place to connect with people across the world with common interests”.
Being myself a 16-year-old biotech enthusiast, I don’t really like Instagram, but I do have a Twitter account where I interact with some of the world’s leading experts in the field, including biohackers and researchers from prestigious institutions.
I think that if I had never used Twitter, connecting, and receiving support from all this community would have never been possible. Twitter taught me some lessons about social media. For instance, that it is now possible to connect people from across the world in ways that we had never imagined, and that we can create online communities based on common interests, without needing to stick to what we see in our near physical environment and follow the status quo.
In conclusion, a single individual cannot determine whether social media is good or bad for anyone at any age. However, each of us can decide how much of our information we want to provide to others, in which ways and what we’ll get in exchange for that. Those who choose to create an account and accept the policies may want to consider the various implications of that click and the thousands of more to come, keeping in mind that those Motorola ads aren’t there because of magic and that social media is a tool but the power remains in our thumbs.
Hey! I’m Sofi, a 16-year-old girl who’s extremely passionate about biotech, human longevity, and innovation itself 🦄. I’m learning a lot about exponential technologies to start a company that impacts the world positively 🚀. I love writing articles about scientific innovations to show you the amazing future that awaits us!
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