11/1/2019 5 Comments Social Media is Toxic for Me2018 was a year full of change and experimentation for me. I had to evaluate a lot of my personal relations and activities that I found to be toxic for my well-being, and the major cause of much of the toxicity in my life stemmed from social media. After completely disregarding my blog in the first half of last year, I used my mid-year break to get a bit of my creativity flowing and conceptualised my favourite shoot thus far - 'A Garden On Her Skin'. Although, after that, I found myself getting lost in the world of Instagram and what I thought were the expectations of being a blogger. I decided during my mid-year break that I wanted to start taking my blog seriously again and become more committed. Being more committed meant posting on social media more frequently and being more serious meant coming up with unique concepts to post on my blog and social media. I was really excited for what the future could bring, but also nervous about whether my ideas would be cool enough to keep people invested in my content. I would spend hours looking at other blogger's pages and accounts in the name of 'research' to gauge audience's interests and what I should be doing as a blogger to become somewhat successful. I concluded that bloggers needed to post regularly so I started taking self-portraits (without a tripod if I may add) that were of hideous quality. I would post these pictures just for the sake of what I thought was the industry norm for bloggers - for bloggers to post every week or even more. Before my recent found fascination with regular posting, I used to meticulously plan out my Instagram feed with pictures I loved the most and what I thought represented my personality best. The regular posting of poor content lead to lesser engagement (the amount of likes and comments) on my Instagram posts, in particular which opened up a new can of worms. I, then, became fixated on how many likes other bloggers and influencers were getting in a certain amount of time and feeling bad about why I couldn't be getting the same. Slowly, I started to become obsessed with social media and not particularly what other people were doing, but how much better their posts were performing in comparison to mine. All I could think about was how I was going to try to 'fix' my engagement and get more followers, and ultimately, gain more popularity because as a blogger, I thought I should have a certain amount of popularity and engagement. It became so bad that I often found myself feeling utterly depressed after checking my social media accounts when my expectations weren't met. So, just before New Years, I logged off. I realised that my mental health was not worth how many people double tapped my picture in an hour, or how many fire emojis were commented on my picture. It was absolutely pointless in caring about something that holds no real significance. "My mental health was not worth how many people double tapped my picture in an hour, or how many fire emojis were commented on my picture." Talking about how caught up we get in social media can feel embarrassing but, there are so many people who go through this. Especially in the blogging community, there's this sense that we need to be 'on' all the time. We need to post regularly, take incredible pictures all the time and live seemingly amazing lives if we want to gain any success on the Internet, but that's incredibly difficult to do. Even people who don't have blogs feel this immense pressure sometimes to keep up with Instagram and live pretty lives that people can envy.
Through this entire experience, I've learnt that social media does not control us - we control social media. Also:
As for me, my main goal for 2019 (and all the future) is to create my content on my own terms, not out of obligation, and do what makes my heart happy. I plan to use social media as a tool for inspiration and realise when checking my phone is becoming too constant. Social media can be a remarkable gift, allowing people to grow their businesses and stay in contact, but like everything, too much is never good for you. Written by: Vidal Thaver
5 Comments
14/1/2019 11:41:56
Do YOU. That's it. Create content that's authentic because at the end of the day that's what we want to see as viewers.
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B.
16/1/2019 15:01:27
That's it V 👩🏾💻 get up in there and serve us with posts that are filled with originality and consistent with creativity 🎉 that's what we want!
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Lelethu
27/1/2020 09:08:11
So well written and authentic!
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