Despite all the research that I’ve done, I still have questions about what happens when you don’t use social media as much. These theories give me the idea that not using social media can be detrimental to your friendship. That’s tough because along the same lines as some of my friends, I think it’s a time-consuming process where people just aren’t portraying themselves as honestly as I would prefer. It is not unusual for college students to create a social media profile simply because they want to find out information about someone or something. The first example that come to mind are freshman year when a friend of mine created an instagram account just to look up her incoming dorm roommate. She had never used instagram before and never felt the need to do so until she wanted to learn more about someone who would be sharing her space. The second, more recent, example that comes to mind is that my friend (the same one who sparked this entire project, by the way) just decided to create a twitter account because the friends on his sports team encouraged him to do so. I personally sent him plenty of funny tweets and his response was always something along the lines of “Oh, you know I don’t have a twitter account, Lauren” and I would say okay and move on. But now, his sports friends ask him to create an account and all of a sudden, I find myself helping him to choose a username. It’s amazing to me how easily we can be influenced by others, even before the creation of the social media account.

In contrast to what these theories are claiming, my friends and I actually feel quite differently. When asked about how they felt about the effect of social media on their own relationships, they felt that it created unrealistic expectations and created more avenues for comparison. It was personally really interesting for me to learn about these theories because I am not the biggest fan of social media. One of the things that I take issue with is the fact that people often only post about the best things that are happening in their lives. At least in my friend group, people only post the best pictures, the best moments of the trip, the best version of their food, the best everything. I can recall a moment when I was on a trip out of state for my friend’s birthday and she literally planned out an entire hour for our group to take instagram photos of one another. I took more pictures on that trip than I ever have before and yet I only saw about three of them eventually get posted on social media. When they did get posted, it was sad to see my friends agonizing over how many likes and comments they were getting. This trip, among other experiences with social media lovers, has only confirmed what I already suspected, which was that social media is staged. In my opinion, it’s just people posing for one another and bragging about little snippets of their lives. While I can definitely see the benefits, and I understand how it can be used as a tool of connection, that unfortunately has not been my lived experience so it was just really nice to see how it can be used for the betterment of relationships.