Social media and us

We all have heard how technology and social media applications are damaging the human relationships with each other and with ourselves. While some of that claim might be true, I have to disagree with the statement. I will even take it a bit further and say that I think social media is helping our generation communicate better with each other. I think it is helping all of us know what, we as a generation, are up to. Let’s take Instagram as an example.

No matter what your life goal might be or what your interest are, you will find at least a handful of people who are doing exactly what you want to do and often they even share how they achieved their goals or finished specific projects. I think it is amazing to have people visually show their journey through pictures, memes, quotes, and captions to go along with the pictures. Having access to people from different parts of the world to share their journey with you is not only motivating but also educational. I will take myself as an example and a pretty generous number of photographers in Nebraska. One day I woke up and decided that I wanted to buy a camera and take pictures. I have a few photographer friends and it seemed to be a rad and fun thing to do. So I went and bought my camera, opened it, turned it on and started to snap pictures of random things around me. I quickly found out that photography is not just snapping a picture. I found out that I had to learn how light works, how my camera works, how colors work, and a lot of other creative and technical things. I started to reach out to my friends to find out how they figured everything out and all of them referred youtube videos and certain IG pages to follow to educate myself.

There are some amazing people who will share their craft with you and will post tips for people who want to do what they do but might not know how to yet.  I got to see amazing work and pick out details in the pictures and that helped me figure a lot of things out. I am also very big on health and fitness, and I have learned a lot about healthy eating and how to properly work out from IG pages of different people who eat healthy and work out regularly. It is amazing how people that have never met and maybe will never meet in person can form these awesome small online communities where they motivate and help educate each other weather it be fitness, photography, make up, fashion, modeling, singing, accounting, dentistry, nursing, architecture … and the list goes on and on. I dislike hearing how technology is bad for us, or it is destroying us and somehow taking away our communication skills or people skills. The truth is that it takes a lot of creativity, skill, and attention to detail to take one picture, write a couple of words and influence, inspire, or educate thousands of people.

Having social media is actually helping our generation be more unified and on the same page because we have access to more people then just our friends in our city, we can reach out to people all over the world.