UNITED STATES—If anything I learned this week it is the fact that we are way too dependent on social media. For the first time in ages, we had a social media outage and people nearly lost their minds America. Why? Well, Facebook, Instagram and Whats App was down for several hours on October 4. People were literally losing their minds that they could not utilize Facebook, Instagram or Whats App.
For me, I simply chalked it up. Facebook is down, oh, well it’s not the end of the world, onto something else people. With that said, Facebook apparently lost a few billion dollars in revenue which is sucky, but at the same time I think Mark Zuckerberg will be ok. The only bad caveat is those businesses that rely on FB, Instagram and Whats App as forms of E-commerce for business and communications with their clients. That outage absolutely hurt them in a major way this past week, but at the same time that is technology.
Technology can always be iffy; some days it will work perfectly, other days you will have to deal with things not going the way that you want them to go. At the same time, the outage proved something that I think needs to be opened to the eyes of so many Americans: you rely on social media way too much. If you’re glued to your phone or computer or tablet 24/7 where you’re thinking about posting on FB, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat and sending messages via Whats App that is indeed a problem.
Your life should NOT be dictated by social media, yet so many of us rely on social media as a way to showcase our lives to the rest of the world. Social media platforms were developed as a way for us to communicate with others from far distances. It has since become a world dominated by social media influencers, which is so laughable when you think about it when someone calls that their day job.
You promote products on your platform and you get paid hefty to do it as a way to connect to hundreds, thousands or millions of people who follow you. I would hope kids nowadays are NOT growing up to say, “Hey, I want to be a social media influencer” as a day job. The sad reality is people are thinking that because they’ve seen people become famous for not doing anything, but going viral on social media. It’s a smart business tactic; it’s savvy, but raises a massive question: what happens if social media ceases to exist?
What if you woke up tomorrow and Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, What’s App, Snapchat, TikTok and so many other platforms vanished. They are no more, how would you function? Would you be able to operate a single day without being able to post something about a business or yourself?
I don’t’ think a lot of Americans could handle that well, especially those born in the 80s, 90s and 00s. I think those born in the early 2000s would have the most difficult, but those born in the 90s and the 80s have adapted quite well to using social media platforms as business jumps for themselves as well. Something people should remember is that social media has NOT always existed. We went centuries without these platforms and we survived very well, so if they go out for a day or two or even a week, just remember it’s NOT the end of the world people, there are other things to do in the world.
