We are living in the age of Self.
It seems we shall forever be known as the social media generation. Early online networking sites such as Bebo and MySpace quickly evolved into “MyFace,” as the first group of technologically savvy began to discover and embrace the phenomenon replacing email as the standard means of online communication: social media.

For the first time ever, we could dedicate an entire webpage to our favourite topic—ourselves. In the blossoming age of digital photography and readily available internet access, distributing our Selfies, and self-promotion in general, had never been easier.
Things seemed to go from bad to worse once a little college website called The Facebook began to surge in popularity. Its far simpler layout and more user-friendly functions began to draw the masses, and soon social media was no longer just a place for bored teenagers and young adults. Whether you were 8 or 80, you too could have a place on The Facebook and reconnect with potentially hundreds of people, most of whom had probably dropped out of your life for one reason or another years ago.

All of a sudden, we all had “friends.” LOTS of friends! All those people who shunned you in high school? Friends. Your sixth grade teacher? Friends. Co-workers from that temp job you did back in 2007? Friends. What an awesome Self-Esteem boost! It was around this time that The Facebook dropped the “The” and simply became “Facebook,” because it was now a name that needed no introduction. EVERYONE who was ANYONE was there, and if you hadn’t joined yet, it was only a matter of time.

Soon we all had so many friends, we didn’t quite know what to do with them all. After a polite chit chat, reminiscing about the good old days you could both recall, and perhaps the exchange of old photos, there was never really much left to say. But that was OK. You could still nourish your friendship through simple one-liners on their selfies or show your emotions on a matter with a simple 🙂, 😦, or even a ♥️ if that person was someone of importance. You were still friends, and this was good—because more friends = more popular = more better…right?

Then came the “likes.” You no longer even had to go to all the effort of typing anything. A simple click of a button (or more commonly a tap on a screen as smartphones not only became more readily available but far more affordable) was all you needed to maintain that “friendship.” We liked, and we emoted where necessary. We even went to the trouble of typing entire sentences where it seemed appropriate to do so, or of course—if our “friend” had a birthday. Anti-social networking was on the rise.

More and more though, we reflected on our own virtual Self Portraits. Our Self Validation came through the attention we got on our “Selfies” and our posts. We all soon worked out that nobody likes to read bad news, so we learned to hide our true feelings and only post about the “good stuff.” New cars, graduations, babies, anniversary presents, relationships, new haircuts…this was the stuff that got us the “likes.” No one wanted to be the person who got unfriended for being a downer on Facebook. We began to hide our true selves and project what we thought people wanted to see.

The birth of Instagram and later, Snapchat further intensified the need to be seen in the public eye, while making it even easier to simply press a button in order to have a bastardised version of conversation. If a picture is worth a thousand words, how much more is a series of seemingly irrelevant happy snaps of each other pulling funny faces?

We turned the microscope even more on ourSelves and as our Self-Centredness rose, our need for Self Validation did also. Failure to collect those daily “likes” and rare comments often resulted in loss of Self-Worth, and lack of online attention led to feelings of Self-Loathing and despair. If we all had so many “friends,” then why did we all feel so alone?

Social media has become admittedly  a more essential vehicle for connection than simply just a platform to shriek every thought from and receive confirmations of our beliefs and internalised biases of the world we know. We use LinkedIn to connect professionally, share ideas, network, and discover opportunities to enhance our career journeys. We use a wide variety of visual and audio mediums across the wider spectrum of the social media landscape to reach people with advertising and public service announcements. Important news events in the public interest compete with misinformation and viral trends that occurred at times only moments ago spread across the globe with the same rapidity as airborne influenza, invading our minds in the same way as germs and pathogens infect our bodies. Some of these digital “viruses” are helpful, but many are not doing much more than further contributing to a degraded sense of Self Identity. The algorithms bespoke to each of us create continuous feedback loops of what we think and feel, further reinforcing the cognitive biases that drive disconnect and division.

We spend so much time viewing life from the barrel of a camera lens, trying to record the moments we believe will get the most recognition. We try so hard to document every second of our life, every new look, every milestone, every pretty landscape… yet we are missing each moment as we record them, the vastly rich definition of reality giving way to the pixels and soundbites that are the poor copy our phones manage to record for posterity.

I don’t pretend for a second to not be one of the Self-Generation. As an elder millennial, I’ve been on social media sites for almost 20 years already. My various online profiles are testament to my Self-Obsession. I’m pretty sure that my Profile picture album alone contains almost as many Selfies as the rest of my online albums combined…but none of the “likes” I have received over the years have done anything for my Self-Image – if anything, they make me feel worse at times because for each of those shots that made the grade and were deemed worthy of public scrutiny, there were at least a dozen more that were taken and, in my opinion, looked appalling. Each shot in my album is merely what I see as my most flattering angle, and is not a true representation of who I see myself as “in real life.” I’m sure I’m not alone.

I’m making an assumption here, but seeing as you have made the effort to stay the course and read this incredibly long ramble… I’m going to assume you have a lot of patience and a better attention span than at least 80% of either of our “friend” lists. I want you to realise the following truths about yourself, your friends, your family, your old schoolmates, your former work colleagues, your distant cousins, that Aunt of yours that you added to your friends list but block from seeing almost every update… and even me.

We are all MUCH more interesting than our online profiles. We are all FAR more attractive than our collection of supposedly realistic (filters, anyone?) Selfies. We are all far more complex and emotionally diverse than those song lyrics or that viral picture we just shared because its generic description described us “perfectly.”

We are amazingly complex and wonderful creatures. A simple image or video and a few lines of text could never do the real you (or anyone else for that matter) justice. While it may be nice to log on and see how everyone we know are feeling, and what they are all up to, we need to remember that this is not real life – just the palest of imitations.

I’m not asking you to do anything radical like deleting your profiles or smashing your precious device. I’m literally writing this to you using my own. All I request of you, wonderful reader, is to occasionally look around, and actually *live* the moment.

It’s fine to share it later—but maybe, just maybe, we don’t need to capture everything to validate our lives.

You are worth so much more than your last post.