The urge to hop on things has never been a problem for me. I don’t know if it’s due to the way I was created or something I picked up while growing up.
I recall everyone’s excitement back in high school during the inter-house sports seasons. I was excited, too. But while everyone ran to the school field to watch their favourite persons engage in one sporting activity or the other, I’ll be found in the library reading Robert B. Parker’s, Spencer novel or in a teacher’s office arguing my heart out. To me, it was the school cutting me some slack and letting me off the teachers’ hook.
I have never felt the urge to belong or go with the flow. I usually go against the flow whenever the opportunity arises. You may be wondering what this has to do with anything.
In my high school days, social media was not yet a thing. Perhaps that was why I’ve never had that compulsive urge to follow the trend. Now, in 2023, social media is the in thing. It has come to stay. I mean, I’m communicating with you right now with the aid of social media. Do I have the urge now to hop on things? You’ll find my answer within the lines of this article. So read on…
Recently, a new social media app—Threads—hit the social media space, and I saw how people hopped on it. I wasn’t concerned as to what the app was all about, but I was curious to know why people had this response to social media. Everyone wants to get involved in anything that is trending. Sadly, the majority go into it blindly.
You cannot begin to imagine how speechless I was when I went on Facebook and saw an ad for a Threads masterclass! It’s funny that someone was already being paid to teach people how to use the Threads app that just hit the social media world. Meanwhile, this is something one would ordinarily find out by making proper research. Besides, at the end of the day, they leave the people more confused than they were before.
Gradually, social media abuse is incapacitating our sense of reasoning, locking us up in a never-ending web. Social media is technology. And technology never dies; instead, it is reborn, rebuilt, restructured, and refined. If we keep chasing it, the chase never ends. We only end up exhausted.
We find young people feeling sorry for themselves because a friend on social media looked like he was living the best life. Young people start doing everything possible to live like that friend and when they try and it doesn’t work, they result to crime or end up depressed.
They say the fastest way a child learns is by observation. That is exactly what we do on social media—we watch, observe and learn. Maybe that is why social media has so much hold on us. But we are not children anymore. We are fully developed human beings with minds. The human mind is not a computer. It is not “garbage in, garbage out”. The human mind is designed to think, analyse and rationalise. It is time we began to think.
Anything that has advantages will also have disadvantages. Social media is enlightening. It creates exposure and of course, it is one of the best things technology has done for us. But then, social media is addictive, deceptive, and grossly unrealistic.
So what do we do? Do we abolish it from the face of the earth? No! There is an Igbo adage that says, “You don’t throw away the faeces and the child.”
Social media was created for our use. Unfortunately, it seems social media is using us. People are victimised every day on social media. Fraud and cybercrime are all over the internet, yet, we refuse to think! The criminal using social media to scam people thinks! That is the reason we must think, too. We must learn to analyse everything on social media and strategically position ourselves to get all its benefits.
Back to my question: Do I have the urge to hop on things now? No! I still don’t have the Threads app on my phone…
