Written by: Constantine Wong (3C 2022)
Have you ever wondered how our social media accounts affect us? This is a question I have been asking myself for years. After going through rounds of deactivating and reactivating my accounts, I can safely say what life is like with and without social media accounts.
The main advantage of having social media accounts is that you get to keep in touch with friends and family members across the world. Social media accounts allow you to stay connected with them no matter how far they are. You could be in Singapore and still be in contact with someone in Brazil, Australia or New Jersey. Despite the distance, social media accounts allow us to have a glimpse into their daily lives and ours to them. Hence, having social media accounts help us to keep up to date with our family and friends, and stay connected with them.
Another advantage of having social media accounts, especially for budding entrepreneurs is the ease to promote and sell products. On platforms such as the marketing powerhouse, Instagram, advertisements can be seen after almost every post you scroll. This is due to the algorithm it has in place. It helps businesses grow by analysing the users’ recent searches. The algorithm picks up the top searches and slaps it onto the users explore page. Thus, having social media accounts can enable entrepreneurs to advertise and promote their products easily. They are able to reach out to people who might be interested to purchase their products. In addition, they can also add hashtags or tag relevant people that might help to widen their advertising efforts.
Despite all these, a clear disadvantage of having social media accounts is that it causes you to compare your life with others. It does not matter what you are into, there is always going to be something that might trigger this response; whether it is lifestyle, clothes, studies, house or physique. Anything that has a slight essence of competitiveness will draw you to compare. Honestly, this is not the healthiest thing to do simply because most of the posts you see have been specially curated and edited. Whether it is the boat they are on, or those wash-board abs you are dreaming to have. We need to remember that they are showing the best part of their lives, but they are people too. They have their own problems, struggles and battles. Their life is also not perfect. Most people tend to forget that when we scroll through social media accounts and it affects our confidence when we feel that we are lacking in something. Thus it is crucial that we remember this.
Additionally, another worrying disadvantage of having social media accounts, especially for children is that they are exposed to inappropriate content. It is common to see children having social media accounts now and they may not have the wisdom to stay away from content which is unsuitable for them. Content which are violent or sexual in nature could pique their interest to erroneously explore such topics and this could warp their perception of reality. This is a real problem as it is not safe for children to look and hear about these content at such an impressionable age.
All in all, having social media accounts does come with its advantages and disadvantages. As a user, we need to be discerning and use them wisely. How about you? How do you use your social media accounts?
MJR World of Words 