When Social Media Gets Awkward #Oops
By
It’s World Social Media Day!
Let’s take the time to talk about social media with our favourite fellow, yours truly, Ms. Kendi.
Background: I am poor at keeping up with some of the platforms at my “young age.” With this in mind, let’s talk about the core reason we have social media.
The core reason why social media platforms exist is to connect people, facilitate communication, and enable the exchange of knowledge, concepts, and experiences on a worldwide scale. Between Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, WhatsApp, Snapchat, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Reddit, to mention a few, social media has made the world a small village.
I used to meet people in the streets and find out they knew a friend or a colleague and think, “What a small world!” These days, I just assume everybody knows everybody so that I am not shocked every second of my life. This has made gossiping way harder. It’s no longer gossiping; we are sharing experiences and information.
Every social media platform was made for different demographics and interests; however, we are really blurring the lines these days. Social media is as fluid as gender identity and sexuality these days. Oops!!!! A story for another day.
Let’s get awkward:
NB: These are not necessarily my experiences; let’s get into it.
We have all those oops moments when your manager follows you on social media and the only thing you post on your Instagram stories are reels on how you do not want more work or hate the annual reviews, and they respond to your story, and you are torn between deleting the account, blocking them, or claiming your account was hacked.
This brings me to my first food for thought: Are we all bipolar? The people we are in real life and the people we are on social media do not add up. I mean, are we bipolar, or is the world driving us mad?
I spend ¾ of my social media time on TikTok, and I can admit that it’s addictive. If my mom is reading this, I will use it to learn. Between you and me, it’s my comic relief platform when it is not showing me a thousand and one reasons why I am single and waiting for the “right mzungu” for me. I came across the story of one lady who initiated and planned her whole future. The story starts with the lady — let’s call her Zuri. Zuri wrote down the type of man she needed and then combed through the streets of LinkedIn to find her perfect match. She found a “tech bro” who fit what she wanted. She later enrolled in a pottery class led by Mr. X’s father with her friend and started talking about the kind of man she wanted. To cut the story short, she was introduced to Mr. X by his father, and as of the time I was watching the video, they were engaged to be married.
I don’t know about you, but it is giving Joe vibes from the series “You.”. However, we celebrate the power of social media. If you were Mr. X and found out, what would you do? Also, ladies, would you go this far in the name of love?
I am Kenyan, and when we talk about social media, Twitter is our battlefield. To be very candid, I am not active on Twitter, but the few times I go through the streets of Twitter, I get baffled. Baffled doesn’t even cover it; the word would be perplexed. KOT is the biggest army in the social world. Yes, I said what I said: Nigeria and South Africa. We win more wars on the keyboard at work than we win the fight for our rights to have good leadership.
All jokes aside, social media has made connecting and sharing opportunities and experiences better, but it is to blame for the deterioration in mental health and interpersonal connections, which results in a shallow and disjointed society. We are more apart, alone, and lonely than we have ever been.
See you on the social media streets!
