The Dichotomy
Social media has completely changed the dynamics of social interaction and how people view themselves within the scope of the universe. Its common knowledge today that many parents in America (in particular) raise their children with the mentality that they are special, and by special I mean abstracted from the notion of purely being valuable and loved in and of themselves. Everyone is a winner, everyone deserves a trophy, hell in most high schools majority of students make the high honor role. Tough love is not something practiced by most families; you work as hard as you can but its fine simply because you tried your best. Some people either have it by nature of existing (many pro athletes, actors, models, scientists, etc.), or they have the talent but also put in thousands of hours to rise to where they sit today (entrepreneurs, politicians, other athletes). So clearly there is an asymmetric relationship between success and "effort". Some people simply start on a flatter curve and need a smaller marginal return in order to reach a conventional definition of success, such is life.
In the past, people didn't internalize this asymmetric relationship. Besides movements to provide fundamental rights, people were told for the most part that effort, and lots of it, could carry even the simplest of men to success. Some of those men realized they were special, others realized they weren't .. and the asymmetric relationship became an afterthought. Today people ultimately come to the same conclusion, but social media compounds the nature of human beings to feel a strong emotional connection to that desire to remain special, different. Teenage girls today have the highest reported rates of depression of any point in history. In total 20% of teenagers experience depression prior to turning 21 and only 30% of these cases are even diagnosed. (http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2010/03/04/why-are-so-many-teens-depressed/)Teenagers are mentally unstable by nature of wide oscillation in hormone output. Moreover, teenage years are plagued by a carryover of the optimism that is instilled in youth. The world is in fact your oyster and everything you ever dreamed of should be yours for the taking, and that makes failure all the more stressful.
So where does social media fall into this equation?
(1) Social media builds off the desire of every person to be that special talent that their parents and society once told them they could be. The ego becomes the primary subject of all interaction through media.
(2) Building off (1), social media exposes people to elements of success and failure in others lives that they wouldn't have access to naturally. This comes directly at odds with the desire prefaced in (1). If so and so is doing x and is happy, why am I not doing x as well?
(3) Because social media exists forever, (2) is continuously compounded over time. As time passes and so and so continues to love life because of x,y,z achievements, the same person who still has nothing continuously reaffirms (2) while still desiring (1). The end result is major depression.
(4) On the inverse, the person who has achieved x,y,z either begins to think of him or herself as superior which consequently stunts normal functional relationships, and only furthers the narcissist ego trip that initially existed, or they are actually (3) as well because they compare to another person who has done x,y,z,a,b,c.
Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms play into our inherent desires to be somebody but then consequently provide us with a quantification of how much of somebody we are. You are measured by your number of friends, followers, your pictures, how many people "like" your posts etc, etc. The end result of this process is inherently self destructive, and I contend that in many cases it can lead to violence against others as well.
The Company.
As a company social media is also extremely exploitative.
(1) As you may recall, Facebook recently announced unilaterally that it had the right to sell knowledge of your actions to outside vendors. Instagram similarly announced that it could give two shits about your privacy and would sell and display pictures of your or your friends without their consent.
(2) After their IPO Facebook plummeted from a high of $42 to $17 by the time earnings season rolled around. While many average citizens bought into FB thinking they were supporting the company of the new generation, its founder and many other principal investors took advantage of the opportunity to cash out millions of shares totaling in billions of dollars. They then let the ship sink. Smart investors who jumped the gun were in large part unable to short FB because brokers set extremely large margins on the positions (I believe FB would have had to drop by 70% of principal to make money on a $1mm short position).
The Future.
So what can be done about this problem? I suggest that everyone completely cut off from Facebook, Twitter, and other forms of social media after moving on from situations in which it aids in communication. I would argue that FB serves a purpose in college because it allows for easy communication between people who may not have each others phone numbers, and does so in a prompter fashion than email. After graduation, I plan to either completely delete my FB or cut down my friends list to the 100 or fewer people I care most about staying in touch with.
How can social media improve as an outlet?
(1) Separate photos, status updates, and communication services. The interconnection of these services makes social media extremely intimate -- but in the undesirable sense highlighted above.
(2) Make limits on the number of characters that can be written in any given status update. Also make posts visible by group rather than by "friend" or "follower". This will make sure only certain people have access to any given information at any point in time.
The Disclaimer.
This may seem like an extremely hypocritical statement to many readers, especially when a social media mechanism (Facebook) is my primary means of sharing my writing. That being said, if more people read actual print media (books, newspapers, journals), perhaps the proliferation of blogs and other forms would be kept moot. I do think that FB could serve a great purpose to society if it wasn't (a) a corporation and (b) people approached it as a means of sharing ideas rather than sharing their lives. In such a case, people could definitely learn a lot about the world and generate valuable discourse. I mean when was the last time in history billions of people were all connected so closely despite geographic and socioeconomic disparity.
"With great power comes great responsibility" -- Spider Man's uncle referring to Mark Zuckerberg
