Our online vs offline presence

Our online vs offline presence

By: Jonah Wirrick

Ever since social media has been on the rise, people have begun to rely on it for many things. Some rely on social media for remaining in contact with their close friends or relatives. Other people use it for entertainment. Some for news. And some for keeping up to date with the lives of celebrities and other famous people. However, some people use social media as if it is their normal, everyday life. They use it to post updates about their day-to-day life, talk to friends, and pretty much live through social media. For some people, they have begun to put for focus and importance on their social media presence than their actual life.

In today’s world, having a good social media presence is a really smart thing. With a record-breaking 53% of the world’s population being on social media, there are absolutely benefits to have a strong social media presence. For instance, when we meet someone new, one of the first things that we tend to do is search their name up on social media. We do this as a way to connect with them and to see if we have anything in common. When someone looks us up, we would love for our social media page to properly indicate who we are as a person. That way, they can figure out if it would be worth building a relationship with us or not. Or what if after a job interview, the person who conducted your interview looks you up to make sure that they are considering hiring a good person. You would want your best self to be shown on social media. There is nothing wrong with that. However, people have started to put more of a priority on how they look on social media than on how they appear everywhere else.

When we put a lot of focus on something, we tend to put less of a focus on everything else in our life. Social media is the same way. We could put in so much effort to appear like a good person on social media, but if we do not act the same offline, then people will notice. I know people personally who acted completely different in real life than they did on social media. The people that followed them on Instagram or Twitter but never really talked to them in person had no clue what they were actually like. That is because these people tried to act like such a good person online that in real life, they stopped caring about how they acted towards people.

Social media presents us with many great opportunities to reach out and try to be who we want to be. The issue is when we try to be someone on social media that we are not, or that we try so hard and fail at being that person to other people in real life. Friends, family, even people we cannot end up getting hurt, but all we care about is looking good on Instagram. It is important to build a strong social media presence these days, but it is even more important to focus on bettering ourselves in the real world.

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