Against the tide proclaiming how vital social media are in our personal and professional lives, a sudden backlash against social media has occurred. Viral videos showing how preoccupied we are with social media and modern technology are rapidly shared across Facebook. People post statuses declaring their decision to delete their social media accounts, only to reappear a few weeks later. It’s now become popular to blame social media for a number of society’s vices, including extreme bullying, our preoccupation with ourselves, and even, as a previous Collegian op-ed (“Social media make us less human,” Oct. 16) asserted, our own dehumanization.
But aside from all the misuses of social media and the distraction that they present, can we actually examine social media independent from human usage and say that it dehumanizes us? Look at what social media, in their most basic form, intend to do: Provide a new and different way for people to interact with each other. What could be more human than that? And while interacting via social media is obviously not the same as (or preferable to) face-to-face interaction, social media allow individuals to interact with others in ways that they simply would not have been able to 25 years ago.
In its essence, social media are not an entity forcing us to post thousands of selfies or robbing us of our humanity but a tool for human use. This tool can be used for wonderful things, like keeping up with distant family members or sharing moments of your life with people who are genuinely interested in it. This tool can also be used for terrible things, like sending hateful messages to people we’ve never even met or feeding into our vanities. But both of these things, good and bad, are a result of the way the tool has been used, not the tool itself. Claiming that social media dehumanizes us reveals an inability to understand how misusing a tool, while dangerous, does not mean the tool itself is bad. In misusing social media, we are not dehumanizing ourselves but rather revealing our inability to always use tools properly — a flaw that is distinctly human.
Instead of blaming Facebook or Twitter for taking away our humanity, we need to learn how to properly use social media and keep ourselves from using it improperly. However, doing that requires discipline, a skill that a large number of people lack. Too often social media are used to feed an Internet addiction, to indulge one’s vanity, or to perpetuate bullying. Social media can augment our vices, making disciplining our usage of social media especially important. But social media don’t create these vices in people; they’re simply used in a way that magnifies pre-existing problems. And social media certainly don’t always have this effect on people. Is it fair to assert that everyone should stop using social media because some users can’t discipline themselves?
These issues, while concerning, do reveal a few simple truths: Social media, at their core, provides a platform for us to share things about ourselves and about the world. The use of that platform should not be taken lightly, but using the platform in the first place is not an inherently bad thing, nor is it dehumanizing. If we can’t discipline ourselves properly while using this platform, then we need to have the willpower to stop using social media. But we also need to acknowledge that the problem in that situation is not in a website, but in us. It’s up to us to exercise discretion in the usage of social media, and this need to exercise discretion, rather than robbing us of our humanity, reveals it.
