Is social media causing a lot of unneeded stress?

ninerbuff

Personal opinion................yes. Working in a middle school, all kids pretty much rate their status on social media as a definition of them.
I see so many people just snapping pics and being on their phones in the gym instead of stowing it just for an hour.
I know people who end on in live on their Instagram, Facebook, etc. posting just about everything they do and eat.

Thoughts?

A.C.E. Certified Personal and Group Fitness Trainer
IDEA Fitness member
Kickboxing Certified Instructor
Been in fitness for 30 years and have studied kinesiology and nutrition

Hiawassee88

Self promotion gives us agency, but social media stressors can erode our peace. Social distancing can be really hard on humans. Social media norms...take your foot off the gas pedal. Better living through better living. Being seen does not mean we are being heard or being loved.

KL1887

I haven’t had any social media (other than here) in over 18 months now, I’d say personally I interact less with people as a result and at times can feel disconnected from what’s going on with what used to be friendships. Since I’m no longer there to see posts about engagements/pregnancies/separations it’s assumed I’m aware (even by my husband who is on all social media’s).

However for the occasional negative feelings I have above I still don’t feel inclined to start any back up. There appeared to be “like” harbouring posts with barely any connection to their real life more frequently and I do think that that level of being fake constantly will create stress.

AnnPT77

People - at least those in social systems where a large fraction of people have worked their way up Maslow's hierarchy past the first couple of levels - seem to create unneeded stress in one way or another, it seems like.

Now, yeah, some people - maybe lots/most - have stress over social media, and it certainly expands the bully pool and the comparatives pool. When I was in middle school (1960s), we had to use "slam books", notebooks that got passed around, each page with a person's name at the top, and others would write their nasty opinions of that person . . . just to give one example of then-culture. In my father's youth (1930 or so, rural), kids seem to have just played truly mean tricks on each other and beat the bejeepers out of each other, pretty much unimpeded by adults, who were busy subsistence farming.

Every age in human history seemingly thinks its youth are heading for ruination, and that the latest innovations will destroy of civilization, to some extent. Someday, the contemporary humans may be right about that. This time? I don't think so.

Social media does some bad stuff, but it also does some good stuff - connecting people with niche interests who'd otherwise feel like oddballs and total outliers. This community is one example, on its good days. I see some of the same in other online groups I participate in, in other social media. The vulnerable, the easily led, the fragile are sadly injured, but I don't think that's a universal.

I honestly don't see what's wrong with people taking pictures of their food or their deadlift, unless/until they get in other diners/gym-goers way. Their ego-involvement is their problem. Maybe they're tracking their progress in the gym in a good and useful way, maybe they're posing to deceive people, I don't know and don't really care. People have hobbies. Some make more sense to me than others, and I'm sure they feel likewise about things I choose to do.

neanderthin

It's an opportunity for an individual who is just one of 9 billion who now find a technology that changes the polarization of their world. The universe according to Solzhenitsyn was something like, it's circumference is nowhere but it's centre is everywhere and especially now in the technical sense where we have the power to be connected to those 9 billion, instantly and the power associated with that, which is enchanting at the same time dangerously engaging.

A downside is the simple naivety that we are behaving exactly as predicted, lends itself to a very powerful proxy for individual data collecting which not only makes us vulnerable in ways we don't know or even fathom yet but also manufacturers the product that perpetuates shareholder value for the platforms where we exist, and that product being us. We have no idea what we're doing in this age of technology and we're basically still trying to find solutions from the industrial revolution and if we're not careful someone is going to pull the trigger and end our engagement with the natural world. Animals and the natural world always had a synergetic connection that generally kept things in balance until we found a way to circumvent with a large brain. Went to a hockey game the other night and there was a large percentage of people watching their phone instead of watching the game.

shadow5669

I think it adds stress as well as other negative consequences, even for adults. I just deactivated my FB for those reasons. There is some positive in social media, especially for people like myself that have isolated lives. I am just not sure that the positive out weigh the negative.

DFW_Tom

Every leap in communication technology has resulted in new sources of social stress. The level of personal communication directly relates to the amount of stress experienced. The best influencers and communicators are the ones who history remembers shaping the social norms of their times.

Kids in Middle School usually aren't attempting to bring about historic change, (Greta Thunberg being a notable exception). They are just trying to fit in and be noticed using the communication tools that help them the most. Today's tools gives everyone a global voice that is difficult to raise above all the other noise. Good or bad, Social Media is a societal leap that is here to stay. And yes, the resulting stress is necessary for this new way of communicating to mature.

ninerbuff

If you have kids with phones, please start checking their social media. In the school I work at, several students have been caught passing around "personal" pics amongst each other. These are all minors and those that have confessed have been appropiately disciplined.

A.C.E. Certified Personal and Group Fitness Trainer
IDEA Fitness member
Kickboxing Certified Instructor
Been in fitness for 30 years and have studied kinesiology and nutrition

ninerbuff

I have to remind a few of my clients, especially the ones who are always on the phone for work, to just put their phones away for the 30 minutes we work out. It's their only real time away where they can concentrate on themselves.

A.C.E. Certified Personal and Group Fitness Trainer
IDEA Fitness member
Kickboxing Certified Instructor
Been in fitness for 35+ years and have studied kinesiology and nutrition

springlering62

“Hey, chatbot. Create a picture of my face on a banging body, with a super healthy meal in front of me.”

rileysowner

Personal opinion: Social Media is not really social at all. It seems like it would be. It would seemingly serve as a point to connect to people that was not around previously. However, it seems that rather than connecting people, it divides them. As Social Media has increased so has the division in our society. While there are likely other factors, the algorithms that affect what a person sees will increasingly put before them things and support their view point. This seems to have the effect of making them much more entrenched and unwilling to discuss issues at all.

AnnPT77

rileysowner wrote: »

Personal opinion: Social Media is not really social at all. It seems like it would be. It would seemingly serve as a point to connect to people that was not around previously. However, it seems that rather than connecting people, it divides them. As Social Media has increased so has the division in our society. While there are likely other factors, the algorithms that affect what a person sees will increasingly put before them things and support their view point. This seems to have the effect of making them much more entrenched and unwilling to discuss issues at all.

Personally, I think it's both.

It's so much easier to connect, now, with people who have (benign) niche interests and hobbies, and feel a sense of connection or belonging, feel less like one is a weirdo social outcast - feel less alone. It's easy for me to find people who also like certain semi-obscure musicians, who do visual journaling, to learn more about rowing from a wider selection of people than I can access in real life, and that sort of thing. None of that fosters "us vs. them", that I can see.

I think MFP's Community or friend-i-verse serves that kind of purpose for some, especially for people who have few or no people in their social circle who are focused on healthy eating, healthy body weight, being active and getting more fit. To some extent, it does that for me, though I do have some real life connections of that sort.

But yes, social networks also help people who have niche views or activities of a negative sort to find connections, and begin to reinforce "us vs. them", more rigid, or even conspiracy-theorist thinking . . . sometimes at extremes, even pure fantasies of that sort.

As context, I was adult well before the internet sprang into being, let alone the world wide web, social networking apps, or the like. When I lived in a small rural community, especially before I went to college (a big university, BTW), I had various interests that were shared by literally no one I knew. It was isolated and isolating. Social networks make that kind of isolation less likely these days. I was not a member of a truly marginalized group, just someone with unusual interests.

I can't even begin to imagine how isolated members of marginalized groups in places like that felt back then (even though I'm aware that social networks and the online environment generally can also expose those people to new kinds of online abuse).