Social Media Killed the Social Life

Speaking to the ever-expanding online community, essentially anyone you meet is bound to have one—if not an abundance of— social media accounts. There is an opportunity offered by these online platforms to build an identity for yourself, regardless of whether it rings true to your genuine character. In doing so, the act of socializing grows increasingly difficult and what once began as a way to stay connected, share, and interact within your social circle, has evolved into what is arguably doing the exact opposite. As the users of these platforms, we hold ties to a surplus of individuals, providing us with a window into their daily lives. Now, one’s tendency to overshare is made available to anyone who chooses to tune in while the intimate details of their lives become common knowledge. With the inclination people feel to recount their daily lives, there is little information left to learn in real life interactions.

This abundance of information makes for an excessive amount of knowledge on people we may have only had a single face-to-face interaction with. It’s become important to be mindful that much of the information being consumed is, more often than not, a depiction of an individual’s ideal self. Instagram and Snapchat act as highlight reels that make it hard to distinguish what is being documented for the sake of sharing from that which is merely adding layers to an online image. This expanding culture of oversharing has made real-life interactions plain uncomfortable. I’ve found that there is an observable shift in social cues. What once were innate mannerisms on what is appropriate to say or do are now replaced with phone checks to avoid lulls in conversation. Additionally, there’s a need to disentangle what we’ve seen online from what we’ve been told in person. By fault, this creates an environment where we have adapted to act ignorant to the details we have full access to online.

Information concerning what someone did for a birthday, what anniversary a couple just reached, or who went to a bar last night may not feel like information you technically should know when making small talk. Someone whose timeline you may know entirely may seem too socially distant to even say hello to in passing. We act according to the assumption that we’re in the dark about the details of others’ lives to avoid seeming like we’re keeping tabs on information available to us at any given moment. This new need to go along with polite re-introductions in order to ignore mutual and existent online interactions is stunting one’s understanding of who they’re surrounded by, and in turn, is making socializing increasingly superficial.

By Lauchland Schuler-Lee