Have you deleted your Facebook yet? Yeah, me neither. I’m in bit of a battle with myself on this one, actually. It’s not that I don’t want to - believe me, I really do - but as it turns out, it’s not that easy to just delete the thing. As one of the examiners questioning our dear mr Zuckerberg correctly pointed out towards a reluctant Mark, #Facebook is a monopoly. There isn’t anything exactly like it that we’ll be able to replace Facebook with. Or at least, something that’s as far developed and/or popular like the dark-blue platform. But.. should we even want a replacement?
#Socialmedia have brought a lot of good things, obviously. Every slogan of every social platform ever will say something about ‘connecting the world’, or whatever. For most of us, it was just a lot of fun to find old friends and being able to communicate with our current friends. After that, as more people signed up, we wanted to edit our profiles to be as aesthetically pleasing as possible. Luckily for us, Facebook didn’t give us much space to edit our own profiles. The inclusion of the cover photo didn’t come until later, just as the featured photos-option. And so still, all profiles look pretty much the same.
It wasn’t until Instagram exploded a couple of years ago when I started worrying about how I came across towards the world in general. I didn’t think about the pictures I posted at first - it was just for fun, and for friends - until people started making money off of their accounts by being pretty and using fancy filters (that they paid for). Without asking for it, you’re now constantly confronted with every person in the world doing better than you or being prettier than you are.
I didn’t have any Photoshop-skills when I was young and so I’ll forever have to live with pictures of myself with braces, short hair, pimples and silly clothes. To me, ‘mascara’ was make-up. It almost feels unfair when I see fourteen-year-olds today. They should be entitled to the same amount of awkwardness I was. And of course, a lot of them are. You just always seem to be looking at the ones who are doing better.
So I guess I'm considering deleting Facebook. It’s not even necessarily about the data leaking and invasion of privacy - though I have to admit, that's a pretty horrible situation we've gotten ourselves into. But social media in general have created a new form of being able to compare, and thus new insecurities. And deleting Facebook won't be enough, of course - as we all know, they bought Instagram and the messenger app WhatsApp. So how do we stop ourselves from constantly feeling the pressure to achieve? How do we stop comparing ourselves to the seemingly perfect 1%? How do we stop this 'sickness', this weird obsession we have, by looking up people that make us feel horrible about ourselves?
At this point, I have absolutely no solution for myself yet - though I don't 'follow' anyone on my socials except my friends. I do think it’s a good movement we’re working towards though. People quitting Facebook will at least make sure there’s more awareness of the effects of social media.
What do you think? And what’s your plan for Facebook, or social media in general? Do you consider Steemit a different kind of social platform, and why?
