Social Media isn’t the bad guy…

I have been a user of social media since the early days of Myspace. Those were the days when you could customize the HTML to change the background and really customize your space. You could organize your top friend’s list but one thing that didn’t change from the real world was the drama. Mean spirited social media posts aimed at fellow students. Nasty email messages being circulated; it wasn’t anything any different than those nasty notes getting passed in school or those vicious rumors being spread behind your back.

Fast forward 14 years, and I see the same things on social media and the internet as I do in real life and the only real difference is that when people say horrible things on the internet, there are vastly more people there to co-sign on the nastiness. Example: A girl posts a selfie and a man posts a nasty comment about it. Other men who agree with the comment can like and/or comment with the original comment whereas in public if a man should be so bold as to say something nasty to a woman about her looks, there may not be anyone who will jump in and add to the insulting behavior but when you’re online and you see 100 likes on a negative comment, it seems worse. The actuality is that those men don’t just exist on the internet they exist in real life too so to think that the internet or social media is what makes people mean is flawed logic.

The way I see it, social media and internet are like alcohol. People get drunk and do things they wouldn’t normally do because alcohol gives them “liquid courage”, as they say, and it makes them act out of character but really what it does is it lowers inhibitions and amplifies parts of your personality. So if you aren’t normally a talkative person but when you start drinking you become more talkative, that’s the alcohol lowering your inhibition and enabling the part of your personality that is talkative to become more prevalent. The internet and social media work much the same way. People use social media and the internet for a number of reasons. Some people get on there and pretend to be someone else because they don’t have the confidence to be that person in their everyday life. Whatever the reason, good or bad, people are the problem not social media.

A man that beats his wife when he is drunk can blame alcohol all he wants but we can’t blame the alcohol because if alcohol were the reason, more men would be beating their significant others due to alcohol. I won’t say that alcohol doesn’t help, but like I said if you hit someone when you are drunk you probably would have done sober under the right circumstances because people are aren’t violent just don’t turn violent for no reason. If you hit someone when you are drunk it’s because you had a violent tendency to begin with and it went unchecked which is why alcohol exacerbates to a point where violence can/does happen. Same with the internet. We can blame the internet for their being crappy people, if that were the case there would be far more crappy people, but instead, the internet just puts a microscope to all the nastiness in the world and when you spend large amounts of time on social media and the internet, you will start to feel as thought it just because the internet because when you go out in public and walk through Target, the man that would comment negatively on a large woman’s post is only thinking it/tweeting it and not saying it out loud, so you don’t hear it or see which makes you feel as though it’s not happening in real life, but it is.

I think people want to blame social media, the internet, and everything under the sun for people being crappy but the truth is that some people are just crappy human beings and the only thing we can do is work as a society to encourage social mannerisms that allow people to live in dignity in the real world and in the virtual world.