There might be a lot of benefits in using social media but I believe the disadvantage overweighs them.
Except Twitter, I do not use any other social media. Whatever points I am going to make further does not apply to Twitter and reason for that deserves a sperate article.
But in short Twitter is platform where you are judged by your thoughts and you make friends by judging their thoughts.
Twitter can be used to can gain knowledge by following people of the industry in which you are interested and get their wisdom. (For the record, those people are generally not available on other platforms)
Getting back to social media…
What social media actually does is divert your time and energy to swallow content made by others.
Most of the time what you are watching is generally thrown at you by a team of experts who study your behavior and design the algorithm specific to you.
Being on social media you tend to spend time thinking about things which would never matter in your life. Like: what celebrities are currently up to, Cat videos?, etc.
Let me summarize in bullet points, what I am trying to say here:
- People sometimes just want to travel so that they can upload a post on social media.
- Instead of living in the moment everyone takes out their phone and starts recording it.
- People start thinking about likes and why someone followed/unfollowed them.
- Huge distraction: As humans are extremely social animals we also want to see what others are doing with their life. This eats up a lot of time in our daily life.
- Its not only about time but the comparison we indulge in. Comparing yourself with others based on followers, likes, or your profile’s timeline.
- Social media takes away your solitude, actually this problem is with the usage of smartphone itself, today our minds have become so hardwired that whenever we get free time our reaction is to get dopamine hit by using social media.
- Misinformation: Social media contributes a lot to misinformation. Anybody can upload any information which can spread like fire across the world and the sad part is people start believing in such information.
- Experts behind the screens who make us push the buttons. There are people out there who are getting paid for making us push buttons on our screens. Like Jeff Hammerbacher said, ‘The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads‘.
I totally agree with Naval that social media indeed has become the modern struggle.