(Un)Social Media?

Everyone is living for everyone else now. They’re doing stuff so they can tell other people about it. I don’t get all that social media stuff, I’ve always got other things I want to do – odd jobs around the house. No one wants to hear about that.
Karl Pilkington

 

When I woke up today, the first thing I did was that i checked my Instagram feed. I’ve done this since I made an account, roughly four years ago. Somehow, I put this task before anything in the morning. However, every morning it’s the same things, you see, I follow accounts that are based in America, like National Geographic and miscellaneous celebrities that I’ve given the odd follow with the passing thought of “What do they get up to?”. However, the REAL reason I check my Instagram feed is to see what all my friends and acquaintances are doing, or what they have done. We all have that inner feeling of curiosity, finding out what other people, much like yourself, do to either feel informed, superior or, in a malicious way, laugh. It’s all relative to the person browsing. This isn’t just for Instagram, this is for most social media accounts like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and the like.

 

Now, when I first made Facebook back in 2010, it was the dominant force on the Internet, co-existing with Youtube. To talk to friends and family, as well as update my “status”, alerting people of my thoughts and feelings, or just what I was up to, I used Facebook. To watch funny videos of cats or people being categorised under an “Epic Fail” compilation, I used YouTube. I didn’t have a smartphone back then, so it was all on my laptop. Then a few months later, I heard about Twitter, a social media platform that allows short posts consisting of up to 140 characters. I wasn’t too interested at the time, but as the years went by, my friends’ statuses started to decline, everybody had moved to Twitter.  This was because of the increased connectivity, and humble interaction of Twitter. I started posting my thought, feelings and situations on Twitter instead of Facebook, and the interaction with these were incredible. It felt more conversational, unlike Facebook’s announcement like statuses. Safe to say, a few weeks into using this, I was hooked.

 

Jump to 2012, and I’m looking through my Twitter feed, and I spy that someone has uploaded a tweet with a link to their Instagram account. I have a look into the link and I see photos of them, what they’re up to and how they’re feeling. It’s was like Twitter, but picture based. I instantly fell in love with this app. Sharing screenshots of the songs I’m mad about, original content (plus the odd selfie), it provides users with confidence.

 

Now that social media is widely available on smartphones, you can sometimes find yourself lost in a trance of different videos, photos, tweets, statuses and information on the go. It’s became an essential for someone to take that perfect profile picture, for someone to recieve over 10 likes on a Facebook status or it’s worth deleting, for your tweet to be funny to have a grand reaction. These are the goals of a typical everyday social media user.

 

(Now, these aren’t the facts, just an opinion from a Web Designer)

 

IF YOU need social media accounts set up and maintained along with your Web Design East Kilbride website, contact us now on 01698 803917