I'm 21 years old and I barely use social media - Social media popped up and gained a lot of traction during my middleschool to highschool days - Back then everyone had a Facebook so I bend over to social pressure and made one myself - I was 14 at the time - I gathered a moderate number of followers around 500 - 600 ppl but only knew 100 of them IRL. I never got into posting pictures updating statuses and all that hype as it felt superficial and not genuine. I deleted my facebook a year later at 15 (lack of interest). 5 years had passed and I had no Social media presance (maybe a rougue pic of me here and there from friends - but not attached to a account of mine). During those 5 years I spent blisfully unaware of social media it had grown - All theese new platformes had emerged and had gained milions of users.
Summer of 2018 I made a Instagram acc - I was working on a project with a friend of mine and he suggested I'd make one so we'd use social media to gather attention to our work - I accepted and made one but felt out of touch with the social media community and quickly lost interest again (had it for around a month before and then I just stopped checking on it)
I'm an artist (illustrator) by proffesion and was interested how other artists use Instagram to gain followers so people would appriciate their work - But I realised by browsing the "Search Feed" that I was mindlesly browsing - passing up posts by great artists just because they were clummped up next to each other. The art lost its meaning in a scence beacause there was an over saturation of great works displayed very close to each other and I would only spend a couple of seconds on each and not truly experianceing the "piece" as you would in a gallery where it would have your attention for a longer period of time.
The reason I'm writing down my thoughts and expiriance with social media is beacuse I am very conflicted - I recently started university and there is a lot of cute girls that I would talk up - Sometimes we'd have a great coversation and would like to keep in touch but they would be put off by the idea that I'm not on social media. And so I'm questioning myself if the choice of not participating is actually bad for my social status - it seems to be that I'm at and age where social media presence is essential for maintaining a social life. Some of my friends would use Instagram to talk up random girls - While Im here doing it the old fashioned way going up to them and starting a coversation.
Should I just give up and join the mass or keep going against the grain?
Submitted January 12, 2019 at 05:24AM by Sybrqk http://bit.ly/2M4vWB7
