A couple of weeks ago, I posted about social media. You can read that post here, but the irony is that last Monday the world got a brief, if albeit very real taste of being without social media for a period of time. For me, it went unnoticed until my wife texted me and asked if my Facebook was working. I opened up my app and found that I was able to scroll through my feed without issue and it looked like folks had posted stuff, so I thought nothing of it. In fact, we were convinced it had something to do with our internet at home, or perhaps my wife’s devices. Turns out that the feed I was looking at was exactly the same as it had been hours earlier and hadn’t refreshed. I keep so few friends on Facebook that apparently I didn’t even notice.
Within a couple of hours, I began to see articles online about the outage and the impact it was having on people. It was entertaining to me, the one who was able to make his way through the entire day without a care whether he had social media or not. The fact that I was at work kind of helped, since I was focused on that as opposed to my phone. But the outage apparently affected several social media platforms besides Facebook. By the time I got home from work that evening, the outage had been rectified and things were back to normal.
When I took the time to reflect on it, I found it disheartening how so many people were “affected” because they suddenly couldn’t use these platforms. I felt that it further went to fortify my position that we, as a society have come to depend on social media and the internet far more than we should. It wasn’t until my voice of reason (my wife) pointed out that some people actually depend on social media platforms to run and advertise their businesses and an outage can be detrimental to those businesses. When viewed through that lens, I can get how having an outage of several hours would be detrimental.
Despite the love/hate relationship I occasionally have with it, for better or for worse, social media is here to stay. Hell, I don’t even make money off this blog, but I’d be upset if our platform went down for any period of time. So I get it. But I think it should serve as a bit of a wake-up call for some who were unable to get through their day without posting, viewing and using their social media platforms. It’s definitely a demonstration of the current mindset of society. Who am I to say whether it’s good or bad? ☯️
The Blogging Buddhist 
I held off commenting here for a few days so my bad mood didn’t inadvertently stink up your reply section. 🙂 Mood has improved, BUT I still have to be blunt, lol.
In my OPINION, 95% of social media is just ego aggrandizement and a home for (very staged) selfies. That’s something that people will vigorously deny to avoid looking at their own shortcomings.
Your wife has a partially valid point about businesses, HOWEVER. social media is supposed to be a tool to drive people to a business’s actual website, their etsy / amazon / ebay page, etc… A business that’s totally dependent upon social media is NOT marketing correctly. SUch a business is lost in a crowd, AND the outcry serves to highlight how ‘last 15 minutes’ the social media crowd tends to be as well.
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