By: Zoe Strickland Managing Editor
As a college student who’s almost constantly looking at new jobs and updating her resume, it’s become more apparent that possibly employers want you to disclose your social media handles. But what are the ramifications of social media becoming more integrated into both personal and professional culture?
It’s becoming more essential to have and update social media accounts but, for some people, time spent on social media can be damaging to mental health.
Humans always want to put their best foot forward; and it’s easy to do that from the privacy of a computer screen. Social media platforms, particularly Facebook, have become personal museums of careful curation. There’s hardly a day where I can go without someone in my family asking me if I saw what so-and-so posted on their profile.
Taking time to make sure that an online presence is a perfect and impressive representation of who someone is can be stressful for both the people posting and the people reading the posts. The curation of social media presents a false sense of positivity, while also resulting in an atmosphere where one person is more likely to compare their life to the lives of the people around them.
In the NPR “Hidden Brain” podcast episode “Schadenfacebook,” a similar idea is discussed.
“As you watch the seemingly idyllic lives of your friends on social media, you may find a voice pointing out that your vacations are dull by contrast … that your relationships seem to be painted in gray, while everyone else’s seem to be in technicolor,” said “Hidden Brain” host Shankar Vedantam.
In a 2015 study done by Ottawa Public Health, researchers found that teenagers who spent more than two hours on social media reported having decreased mental health compared to teenagers who spent less time engaged in social media.
Social media is exhausting; with a blinking light in the corner of a phone, it’s easy to get sucked into reactions and posts and comments.
Being constantly alert and ready for social interaction- even when engaging over the internet- takes a mental toll. The brain needs time to rest.
As someone who recently took major social media websites off of her phone, I can speak to the fact that life becomes significantly less stressful when disengaging with social media websites; even if that means taking an app off of a phone and only going on social media when sitting at a computer.
As I got used to not having the applications on my phone, there was less of an impulse to check-in and see what everyone was doing. Because this impulse slowly started to go away, I became less aware of what my friends were posting; and therefore less stressed about how my life measured up. My Facebook feed is full of people from high school and college who are getting engaged and having babies; comparing my life to their feed will help nobody.
People tend to either drift closer to the social media sphere or pull themselves almost completely out of it; the first demands significant amounts of brain space, while the latter is routinely looked down upon.
The world is becoming a place where people are forced to either engage with every fiber of their being or not at all – it just depends on how much of their own mental space they’re willing to give up.
Contact the author at zstrickland14@wou.edu
