Guest blog: the contradiction of social media

Guest blog through Lisa de Wit from Vrijdagonline Web design

A video that is currently circulating on social media is 'Look up' by Gary Turk. You have undoubtedly encountered it once on Facebook or another medium. Turk believes that in today's world, where we are constantly making online contacts, we are actually becoming less and less involved with each other. The message is brought in a romantic way and is confronting and moving in this way. Is it true that we are actually becoming more anti-social through social media?

Social media

Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Youtube. All of them popular social media channels with an enormous number of users. Nowadays, everyone has an online profile somewhere, regardless of age, gender or background. On Facebook, someone quickly has hundreds of 'friends' and if you approach it correctly on Instagram, you can get thousands of 'followers' in this way. But are these your real friends? Do your followers on Instagram and Twitter really know you? Of course not!

Follow me!

Many people are wearing earplugs on the train and they do their best to make as little contact as possible with others. A talk? No dude, maybe you will get a result! While it's so easy on social media: just press a button and you follow someone or have submitted a friend request. Seen a nice person on Instagram? To follow! Who knows, maybe you will follow him back, and then of course you have built a good friendship! This is nonsense of course, but that is how it is today. We seldom speak to people on the street for a chat, because you don't know how the other person will react to it.

Who am I actually?

This also has to do with the anonymity that social media entails. The threshold for making contact is much lower than 'in real life'. We are behind a screen and can relate
actually act the way we want. Social media is a solution for people who have trouble making contacts in real life. Maybe someone is very quiet and shy in real life, but online unwise spontaneous and a real chat maker. We also think we know a lot about those we follow or are friends with on Facebook, because you see daily updates passing by and we can even tell what someone ate in the evening. But is this really true? Does anyone also tell her boyfriend has cheated for the third time, or does she just tell her she has received such a beautiful bunch of roses from him? Although we think we know people well, there may be a dark truth behind the online utopia.

Finally

Gary Turk's video is so confrontational, because we all know that social media is not at all social. Although we have many online friends, we are sitting on the couch on our own chatting with these friends instead of being in the pub together. Of course we all have some good friends that we regularly see in the real world, but
we also realize that we are not getting happier from all superficial online contacts. Gary Turk makes a good statement with this. The irony is that he uses social media to convey the message that we should use social media less. Maybe he should have thought about that a little longer?

By Vrijdagonline, web design and online marketing.