You know exactly who I’m talking about: every teenager who’s on social media. Beginning with MySpace, then onto Facebook, and now Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and Tumblr, these kids have grown up with social media everywhere. It’s a way of life, and for a lot of them, it’s become a part of how they function. As many of these kids are graduating high school and moving into the real world, I’m beginning to notice the severity of the effects that social media has cast upon this world. The “Follow Me” generation contains arguably some of the most conceited people our society has ever seen.
Remember in high school when you would either sit at the popular kid lunch table or envy the people that were? Now-a-days, kids are facing this same popularity issue, but over social media. The more twitter followers you have, determines your self-worth. There are SO many problems with this! Unless you’re private on Twitter and Instagram, ANYONE can follow you. That means that if a 65-year-old man decides to click that follow button, he’s going to see that you’re “headed to the tanning bed,” “having a sleepover with the bestie!” or even view your weekly #SelfieSunday. There are so many dangers with that in-of-itself, but I’m focusing on one for now: This one follow from a complete stranger (who may just be a pedophile prying on its next victim), is boosting your self-esteem. How is this okay?! A lot of kids in this generation believe that the more followers they have, the more important they become. They become obsessed with who’s following who, who they’re following and who of those people aren’t following them back, and how many more followers they have than everyone else they associate themselves with. It’s become an obsession; an obsession that’s corrupting their brains.
Teenagers believe that the more followers they have online, the more friends they have. This problem goes back to the old man scenario. Back when I tried out Twitter, over half of my followers were people I had never seen before. Insanely enough, some of these Twitter fanatics see these strangers as an increase in their friend circle. These teenagers feel better about themselves because of these follows they’re receiving from complete strangers! Does anyone else see something wrong with this?! How can we fix this, and how can we get this generation to realize the complexity of this problem?!
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