Maybe the exile doomed on me this kind of thoughts..... Been on and off the terrain and all I got is this. I am a 20-something, and social media is not the reality but I use it every day. Since the inception of facebook, I cannot remember a week that has gone by where I have not checked one of my social media forums to see what New Things have gone on, or what Nice/Funny Things people are commenting, what's trending and what the new cool is. And I have realized that I am, we all are, self-absorbed assholes. Does it make it okay that we are self-absorbed assholes as a cohort, storming the streets while taking selfies? And live-tweeting every action we make, every step we take.(Gbenga's sub, lool). Or is it just ridiculous that we have been raised in a culture so self-entitled that we are under the impression that our every thought is worth our every friends’ attention and clicks of gratification?
Multiple times daily, hourly, I take my phone from its position no further than three feet from me and flick instinctually to twitter/bbm/Facebook. I numblingly scroll through the current fixed lives of my several hundred casual friends to see what they are up to at that given moment in time. Everyone on my news feed looks so polished underneath their 'Valencia' pain(the man united player's recent apollo injury). They are out with their social media warmth, and me, ignoring whatever warmth is currently surrounding me physically. It seems like a different world, this social media game we play. People, toddling around yards and spaces, judging one another’s happiness by comments, subs, pms, dps. And every like on our posts or every 'true talk' comment on our pms and Timeline is like Winning points. The winning of points based on a computer programed definition of happy; losing points by doing nothing when no one was keeping score. It is a warped game we play, indeed, and we are all playing along like this is forever the norm.
What is ironic and yet understandable to me is the way newlyweds take on facebook before and after their wedding. At that time most couples are unknowingly rubbing their happiness in the faces of all their single friends. Also funny to me how some certain friends likes my post (sensible or not). The best of Facebook friends, giving a thumbs-up to each other’s life accomplishments and then quickly scrolling past said accomplishment on our news feeds, onto our next best friend’s life event that we could bestow a Like upon. Silent praise and envy, mixed into one single passive-aggressive click. I hated it and relished in it at the same time.
Basically, every time we see that someone positively acknowledged our carefully calculated social media world and its posts, we get off to it like it is a drug. It feels good. Then the feeling fades, and we want more. Dopamine is a funny thing, and it is a key player in reward-driven learning. I posted a photo of me infront of trend express(a wrist watch stand in Lagos) and it received way more attention than the inspirational quote I posted a day before it. The People do not want to hear your shit. Man was not created to see what 800 people were doing at one time. Man was created to go out and seek the world, rather than scroll through it.
The main focus of social media is ourselves, and ourselves in comparison to other people. Even if you had not realized that before: how awesome do you feel about your year in a cubicle after seeing your friend’s 850 photographs of him backpacking through life-drama without a care in the world? We are torn between our current lives and our ficticious lives. We post “casual” photographs with friends at a bar in our best outfits, wearing sunglasses indoors like celebrities. And inside, we might feel silly. But outside, we are just playing the game. And after all, that bar photo got like, 53 likes.
I realized that social media, or, Social Media, has been a part of my entire teenaged experience(no longer one tho'). It is an unstoppable force, impossible to get rid of, tap-dancing in our faces to remind us of what we are missing and why everyone should love us, the star of the show. I see ladies pursing their lips in “duck face” mode at the camera, hips popped, elbows out, modeling whatever trend we have created where this is an acceptably sexy pose. I see shirtless guys with crappy abs , photos of fast cars and unobtainable sunsets, selfies and exotic locations. Most of all, what I see is a brag board of envy, a place to highlight our highs in life and to slip past our lows. I on the other hand post both the highs and lows in life that's why I rant a lot on social media, I don't slip past my lows because if I'm gracious to let you know the highs in my life then you must be gracious to accept my lows too (but reasonably both lows and highs should have been kept in a box of secret). I see a carefully constructed fake life, where we tell one of our 563 friends that “ girl, you look so good in that dress,” and then talk shit about how slutty that dress was to our friends later. We are lose-lose in these scenarios. We are lovers and haters of ourselves and those around us. We have false idols and false lives( like I said in an old post). We are posters of fake Marilyn Monroe or winston churchill inspirational quotes and manipulators of photographs, pouring endlessly over which shade and tone slims our thighs the best. We are the writers, directors, producers, and actors in our own lives. And yet we remain our biggest fans, barely noticing the half-hearted groupies hanging on.
I am not trying to start a revolution. I just want to express a state of mind, and hopefully inflict a spot of light onto your consciousness. Maybe next time you go to take a photo of the beautiful sunset in front of you, you don’t. Maybe you just sit in the quiet of the world around you, alone, and watch the sunset quickly fade. And maybe, as it sets, you don’t have to tell anyone about it. You can watch it slink past the skyline and fade away into the distance, and know that it will be back in the morning to cast a light on your new day. Regardless if all of your friends or none of your friends liked that sunset, what matters is that you did. And maybe we don’t need a heart or a Like to give us that satisfaction.
But remember this: no matter how many selfies you take, no matter how many filters you apply, and no matter how many Likes your photo gets, we are all human. And none of us are getting out alive. So next time you take out your camera, think about capturing the moment, rather than capturing a moment just to filter and post it. Because remarking on everything remarkable, just somehow makes that moment extremely unremarkable.
