SOCIAL MEDIA: EXPECTATIONS VS REALITY
In the 21st century, people’s lives are evolving faster than ever, and people can see, communicate and dive through people’s lives with the accessibility of social media. Social media has blurred the boundaries between people’s nature of being an extrovert and introverts. Social media has become a way of expression where people share their happiness, sorrow, and different moments of their lives they feel they would like the world to see. Social media is a wide range of internet and mobile services that provide various services through which people express, connect, and do multiple activities—many internet services related through social media like blogs, wikis, social networking websites, etc. Social media over the years has changed significantly. In the early 2000s, social media was only used to exchange information, and now, it has evolved as a retail and marketing platform where individuals use social media for their business.
What merely was an invention for humankind has become a crucial part of humans. Today, social media has grown to limits that do their business on it and try to influence people’s lives and choices by displaying theirs. Social media is a boon to some people but a curse. People are deeply addicted to social media; they forget that the real world lies outside their electronic devices and beyond the internet. Toda addiction centers are opening in countries like the USA to get free of this addiction. Many people suffer from FOMO, anxiety, and insecurity issues because of social media. As for others, it might be the cause of their happiness. This happiness can be caused by memes and jokes seeing the progression of their account, like an increase in followers or likes on any social media platform. Therefore, this depicts that people rely upon and have expectations from social media and want it to be a changing element of their daily lives. What people expect of social media is not precisely based on lies but is far away from the reality of the physical world they live in.
Social media can differentiate this expectation with many examples, but today we will take the example of a social media influencer. Many social media consumers follow many social media influencers on these platforms. Social media influence has become one of the most significant businesses today. Social media as the type of fashion decision greatly influence people’s way of talking and, most importantly, their lifestyle. These statements the consumers see through social media posts. Social media influencers’ posts about themselves doing some activity or supporting some cause that they think is suitable and popular for now to attract huge followers and likes and help their social media handle grow. These influencers collaborate with various brands to promote their product through social media posts to make themselves more established and rich. Brands search for individuals like this and make them their way of social media listening. Social media listening is how brands know about their reputation and what consumers think about their products and services. These posts are then posted and seen by followers of the person promoting this brand as their own. And the products are presented in front of the consumers appealingly.
Often, social media influencers market these products and services without seeing what kind of audience they have, which is generally minors, and what effect they might have on them. Social media influencers will do anything to stay relevant to the masses so that their popularity is still the same. The public trusts so much in the influencers that they want to make their lives the same as theirs, so they follow them blindly, which has terrible effects on them as what they think is the prosperous land and perfect life of a social media influencer is not the reality. Every coin has two sides, but because of the medium like social media, the other side, the wrong side of these influencers is hidden from the world. This led their followers to think that they only have a good and fashionable life with fame, money, etc., all this when exposed to a follower who is not well informed or educated. In some cases, they try to copy and have the same lifestyle as the influencer, which is unachievable as they don’t know the complete truth behind the life they want to have.
When some instance like this happens, the illusion of what they are seeing does shatter, negatively affecting them. The desirable life they did want to have was not there and was not like as they saw it, which caused them to have depression and mental health issues.
But still, after these examples, people don’t understand that they are not the ones who are using social media, but they are the ones who use them to promote their business, pages, and products through their various ads.
These platforms use various logarithms based on the preferences of what a person likes to see so that he cannot disconnect himself from reality and pops up the ads between them to promote their clients.
Thus, social media does not make us see what we expect, but we see what the social media expects us to see and make our stay there, far from reality, for its benefit. Still, the choice is in our hands to realize and tap out of the fake world of social media and live and expect in the real world.
