The Antisocial Medium

For everyone who received their results this week, congratulations and well done! Irrespective of what you got, I am sure you tried your best and you should be extremely proud.

Today’s topic will focus on social media. It was a thought that came into my head earlier today after a brief conversation with a friend. She commented that she always found it baffling how I survived the entirety of high school and college without a single social media account.

It’s all true. It wasn’t until I joined university that I created an online account. I created it for the sole purpose that I wanted to make it easier for my group of friends to organise house hunting. Since then, my online presence has been used for birthday chats, group projects and extracurricular society commitments. It has certainly made particular areas of my education and social life easier, but I have always perceived it as a distraction.

The truth is that it is too easy to use social media as a way to procrastinate and distract from all the other happenings and goings in life.  Especially during university. The amount of times I have found myself reading tweets during a lectures is countless. Similarly, when I am writing an essay, my mind immediately pleads to read anything but a journal, hence my incessant obsession with the ‘opinion’ section of online newspapers. Although I have learned ways in which to lessen this usage by fancy ways like anti-procrastination apps, or simply shoving my phone in my pillowcase and giving distance.

I think a balance is important here. For me, I feel like at university, I was able to form a more healthy relationship with social media generally. It is important to understand where and when it’s appropriate and how to switch off whenever it gets too much. There are so many great ways in which social media can be used as I’ve highlighted: for example as a form of external communication, a way to improve career prospects, and to keep in touch with current affairs.

Now, my feeling towards social media remains the same. I will happily keep myself out there as a way to keep in touch with friends, especially with university being over. But largely, it serves that greater purpose of educating me about what is going on with the world – which for a graduate, seems closer than ever!