Social Media and Ones Personal Persona

Social Medias and Ones Personal Persona 

Written By: Mireia Bustamante

When Reading My Life Might Look Great On Social Media, But Deep Down, I'm a Ciranolid
Isopod, I noticed there is in fact a repetitive pattern for the number of people who like versus don't
like mine or your posts. On my own Instagram, I have noticed a pretty significant change in my
feed over the past few years.

What Happened?

Over the years as I grew up with the people who followed me, like the friends I went to elementary, middle, and high school with gradually started to unfollow and not like my photos as much. What can you do, it happens with age and as you turn into an adult. The middle school I went to was private and very secluded from the rest of other schools, the only people I knew were the 30 that were in my class for all three years of my life, during that time. I graduated and went to a public school where my class size expanded and I met new people, the same also happened with my junior high peers. As I began posting more and discovering myself and finding the things I was interested in, my middle school friends gradually faded and became acquaintances. Yeah, it sounds cliché, but it’s the truth! I started seeing fewer of them in my notifications and started seeing more of my new friends. Our conversations started to fade and we all stopped talking, but somehow we all still knew what was going on in each other’s lives, isn’t that the beauty of social media.
For a while during my transition from one school to another, after a while, I noticed that I was always photographing and posting my life more than others, not sure what it was, but this phase of mine lasted about a month or so. Once I got out of this trend, I never realized how annoying it was until others started doing it. Oops sorry… but as Taylor said, “how genuine could these Instagram moments be if I'm constantly photographing them?”.

I truly never thought about those moments until after seeing them from an outside perspective. I learned lots of things when viewing these images from others, and as much as I wanted to be private about my life and what I did, I couldn’t. I learned what I was comfortable with posting and what I wanted to keep private, so I began to only show my followers events or pretty places in Austin and everywhere I would travel to all around the United States. For example, this past September I went to a concert that I have been waiting for since 2017, I tried too hard to stay in the moment and put the phone down, and not think about even bringing it out, but I had to, that is a moment I wanted to remember forever but I'm not sure how reliable my phone is because I can’t trust my iCloud or even think about the video being gone years down the road from now. I would get sad, not to be corny.
I posted the video to my Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok, it was a happy moment for me, and I wanted others to experience it too, although many people may not know of the artist that I went to go see, some may watch the video and may be persuaded to listen to his music with how cool I made the video look. Well, frankly, I didn’t make it cool, the artist did. That’s almost like what Taylor said, who wakes up so perfectly and posts a “good morning 😁” photo on Instagram? Nobody realistic, which is unfortunate because as much as we want it to be, it isn’t.

Social media has so many fake personas people feel the need to live up to, well, only people who are unfortunately influenced easily. you're influenced by others around you, friends, videos you watch, everything. Social media has expanded over the past few years in drastic ways, I see so many promotions and advertisements for brand deals they're working with in hopes to get a good cut or portion of the money they make, it’s business through social media. A business is where one person is paid to be and act on something that they're not. I can say it has expanded over the past few years but to think about it, it’s everywhere, not just on social media, it’s on the news, commercials, billboards, and much more. I only see the change in social media because I grew up with it, during the years of 2014-2020, I noticed the change and it grew rapidly.

I am not the only one who has noticed this drastic change in media, some are more verbal about this change than others. Here is an example of a more open social media user who has some words to say based on the influence of other people around you. 

Is social change possible? 

Of course, it is. it is always changing. It can be irritating because we all see how easily persuaded people are, but if we all put the phone down and get it away from our faces for a bit, it will be good to see the real world in a more open perspective.