Social Media and Me: It's not all about Kendall Jenner and Gigi Hadid

I woke up this morning and - as I do every morning - I read the news on several different apps on my phone to see what happened in the world overnight. Then - as I do every morning - I checked my Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat accounts to see what happened in my friends’ worlds overnight.

Admittedly, Kendall Jenner and Gigi Hadid are not my friends in the strictest meaning of the word. But from what I can tell from their Instagram pages, we have similar tastes in clothes and I like to think we’d get on if our paths were ever to cross.

Kendall, Gigi and I are part of a generation known as ‘millennials’, for whom my morning social media ritual has become sacrosanct. The problem is however, it’s not merely a quick morning browse before I really have to get out of bed and into the shower. It is followed by a breakfast browse, a commute to college browse, a mid- lecture browse.. You can see where this is going. I am addicted to my phone and more specifically, to social media; and I am not alone in this regard.

According to statistics released in August 2015 there are 2.4 million Irish Facebook users, 29 per cent of whom are aged between 25 and 34. Twitter boasts 700,000 daily Irish users, with 53 per cent of these aged between 15 and 24. While 18 per cent of the population use Instagram and 22 per cent have a Snapchat account (emarkable.ie).

My introduction to social media came with the advent of Bebo, uploading dodgy photos as a naive fifteen year old. Luckily for us, social media has evolved somewhat from ‘Sharing the Luv’.

As the recent terrorist attacks in Paris and Mali illustrate, Twitter has completely altered the way in which we consume news and has become a vital source of news for us millennials. Even though I check my phone a hundred and fifty times a day, Twitter always has something new to tell me.

Since finishing my undergraduate degree, countless friends have left Ireland. Through Facebook, I can check out the barman my friend fancies in the pub in Bushwick before he even knows she exists - it’s not stalking, it’s research. As my mum often reminds me, we have the world at our fingertips.

But updating one’s social media pages can be exhausting. There are perfectly plated meals to make, breathtaking sunrises and sunsets to capture and shameless selfies to pose for. A quick scroll through Instagram shows most posts to be some variation of these themes. And don’t even get me started on choosing the right filter. Can’t. Even.

What are we missing out on right in front of us while we are glued to our phones? A photo of an elderly woman taken in America at a film premiere went viral recently. The woman smiles serenely as she takes in the event, surrounded by a crowd who hold up their smartphones to capture the moment on camera.

After seeing that image, it occurred to me that there have been many times when I stopped mid- festival, mid- walk and mid- meal, to snap the most ‘Instagram-able’ picture and send out an update online. I mean, if it doesn’t appear on social media, did it really happen?

But do my friends and followers really care about the steak I just had for dinner, or the photo of me on yet another night out? I believe that social media, for all its positive effects, facilitates a culture of ‘You like my post, I’ll like yours’, where we derive and then come to crave, external validation from the number of ‘likes’ our status update gets.

We may not care about the content of the posts we choose to ‘like’, but our interaction with them proves we saw the post and allows us to feel included in the discourse, however banal it may be. It is easy to see how people who choose to abstain from social networking might feel invisible in the digital age.

Popular Australian blogger, Essena O’Neill, faced a backlash recently over comments she made about what she perceived to be the vapid nature of social media. O’Neill replaced captions on her Instagram pictures with more realistic descriptions before deleting her account entirely. She described the posts as “contrived perfection made to get attention.”

You may disagree with this interpretation of social networking sites, but can you truly say you post every aspect of your life to social media, warts and all? I certainly cannot. I do not post bad pictures of myself, or my messy room or my culinary disasters, as I know this is not what people want to see. ‘My life in little boxes’ is a tiny (albeit well- polished) glimpse into my otherwise chaotic life.

I do not doubt the veracity of studies that show a correlation between high levels of social media use and low self- esteem. On social networking sites we can covet our neighbour’s figure, wardrobe, partner and life. Are Kendall, Gigi and their counterparts perpetuating a myth of perfection on social media that is unattainable for the rest of us? And has social media turned us into a generation of narcissists?