In Pursuit of Likes

If a young woman posts a completely innocent picture of herself on one of the various social media sites, it receives likes by her friends and family. But a friend of mine noticed a pattern with the photos people post: the ones in which the women are in more revealing attire and in risque positions, receive twice as many as the ones that aren’t. And the photos that guys post of themselves doing harmful or extreme things, receive far more views. After further research I noticed that anything considered radical or strange enough to be exciting receives more views and likes. How much of those radical posts are of the people’s desire to receive attention from the online High school they now belong to? It causes us to ask: How is our culture evaluating people on social media? And is it fulfilling or harmful for young people to be subject to that kind of evaluation?

            Social media platforms reward extreme or exciting behavior with more likes and more shares whereas photos of family and friends receive less attention. Social media is analogous to an online high school with all the popularity struggles and false relationship constructs that are in place to make people feel dependent on entertaining or pleasing the masses. According to Tobin Bragunier who writes for the Entrepreneur in an article entitled The 4 Reasons why Social Media has become so Toxic and what to look for next, teenagers filmed themselves ingesting tide pods in attempts to gain more attention. The disturbing part is that it worked. More people viewed the teenagers harmful actions because the eye has never had enough of seeing nor the ear of hearing (Ecclesiastes 1:8); people will never have enough new and different things to look at—and they’ll satisfy their lack of fulfillment in life by watching you be interesting online. According to Kara Dubois in her article How Social Media Affects Teens, 75 percent of American teenagers have social media profiles, 51 percent of teens visit social networking sites on a daily basis, and more than a third of teens visit their main social networking site several times a day.

            None of those statistics bode well. If you’re a young woman on social media and you’re constantly posting pictures of yourself and checking them, you become dependent on how it’s received. You’ll be disheartened when people like other girl’s photos more than yours, and constantly feel pressured to push your boundaries to keep people interested. Being a young person on social media makes you subject to millions of people’s opinions who you don’t know, but have been given the right to ascribe however much or however little worth to you they choose. More and more my friends and family on social media say that pre-teen girls are wearing more makeup and adult clothing because it receives more views.

Women shouldn’t feel evaluated by how much skin their willing to show and how much attention they get—they had value before they posted anything and before someone clicked the Like button. And most certainly young girls should not be subject to that kind of evaluation by anyone online. Selena Gomez is a Pop star/actress/singer and she recently expressed how toxic social media was—she stated that seeing herself everywhere and having her appearance be subject to everyone’s judgment mortified self-esteem. No one should feel as if they have to keep posting more, or revealing more of themselves to keep anyone’s attention if it makes them uncomfortable—people are amused momentarily with our posts the same way they are with starlets who they eventually grow tired or judgmental of.

There are some solutions to this: First, children shouldn’t be on social media when their too young to set their own boundaries. Teenagers should be encouraged to live in the real world and not live vicariously through other people’s exciting posts; they should be encouraged to form in person friendships and not be under the illusion that they know someone because they get sent a “friend request”.How many friends do we have? Facebook might say some of us have 500. If we were honest with ourselves and gave qualifiers like someone you trust, someone you’d fight for, someone who would be there if you really needed them-the list gets thinner and thinner. But that’s something that can only be learned by experience, not online. Don’t do something online that will forever be recorded and will entertain people or get views at your expense. It would do our culture well to teach our young people to stop trying to be important to the online world who only sees them as a new brief piece of amusement in their internet oriented lives. And, to know their value and spend time on the people who treat them like they don’t have to jump through hoops to have it.