05 November 2014

How The Social Media Is Eating Into Your Brain

I
joined Facebook few years after I got admission into this prestigious
University of Ibadan; it was unlike several of my colleagues who were already
recording close to a thousand friends at the same time. It was partly due to my
inability to get a multimedia enabled phone prior at that time and my sustained
focus at passing my GCE Certificate Exams.



I
am an introvert; one who totally loves his privacy. So when I found a tool that
could make me stay indoors and interact with the world at the same rate
extroverts do in real life, I fell in love with it. I could meet people without
seeing them eye to eye, I could read across platforms, I could be accepted
without my flaws, interact with less transfer of vices; like I
could be speaking with someone without being in his or her company. Life was
perfect for my introverted self.



But
it took me long before I came to reality with the seemingly perfect lives of
the people on the social media. It began to seem to me like a charade, a façade
at its best; the edited pictures, the endless adventures to city malls and city
shindigs, the faultless lives, and the fact that almost every person is always
at the heat of the moment, enjoying life at its peak.



That
was however not the problem. I had begun to realize how exhilarated I was when
accepting some people as friends, compared to others due to their profiles. It
was an honour to have someone with thousands of friends send you a friend
request compared to the indifference when someone with less than hundred
friends appeared on your Facebook requests list. I had also seen friends
jumping on their parents or uncles’ cars to take pictures meant for nothing but
social media.



Facebook
is unreal until you meet twitter. The twitter world is make-believe. A poverty
stricken lady could be waking up in a Jacuzzi and be deciding whether to have a
toast or eat out at a nearby restaurant that irritates her because their pizza
list has no pepperoni. The updates are endless, so much you wonder if the
country was now full of happy people, perfect people.



And
with Instagram, life could not be less unreal. A life in captioned pictures
tells all the story, so the energy people put into appearing to have the
greatest lives possible cannot be undervalued. And thus, different pressures
are set.

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