Every like matters

Let me just start out by saying I am a huge social media addict. I would have to say I spend about 5-7 hours a day just on social media. Okay, that probably sounds like a lot, but I spend a ton of time checking all of my platforms. Sometimes, I can be a bit hypocritical when it comes to social media. I always laugh at the people who are obsessed with how many likes, retweets, favorites they can get. However, I am the same way whether I want to admit it to myself or not.

The social media platforms that I use are:

• Snapchat
• Instagram
• Facebook

Snapchat
It's funny because I remember the exact moment that I heard about snapchat. I was in chemistry class my sophomore year of high school, and this girl started to take selfies and received them really fast, but could only view them for 10 seconds at the most. I thought it was the coolest thing ever. However, from what was just sending a picture really fast to someone, turned into having "my story" and showing you who viewed your story. This starts to become an obsession. Wanting everyone to know what you're doing and be jealous of it. Come on, admit it. It also began to cause many problems in relationships because you could view people's top three friends that that they snapchat. There is a fairly new feature called streaks. This means that if you have been snap chatting a person for three or more days, it will tell you how long you have been. My own sister didn't talk to me for a couple of days because I "lost our streak."

Instagram
Now Instagram is a whole new game. I heard about this my freshman year of high school, but I'm sure it came out a little before that. Instagram went from being just a fun way to post pictures and show you're friends what you're doing, to being obsessed with how many likes you get. People think that the more likes you get, the cooler you are and the more you are accepted. Believe me, I have this problem too. I worry so much about my likes and how many likes I get each minute. Another problem with instagram is filters. Specifically with girls, they want the perfect picture and to never show many flaws. Filters are a way to change the colors in the picture around to make it look better. So honestly, you don't know what is the original picture and what is not.

Facebook
Facebook is more of an older generation like baby boomers thing. Of course, I did have it when I was a teenager and still do, but it has slowly gone away. My 15 year old sister and all her friends do not use it, so I think it many have cut off close to my age range. Facebook is a more complex platform, and I feel like you can do so much more with it than Instagram. It is not usernames, it is full names and I feel like it's a more personal platform to reconnect with family and friends.

I think that social media is clearly taking over our world, and opening up so many more opportunities for people for social reasons and business reasons. Even though it is doing so many great things, it is also hurting people's self confidence to feel perfect. And this is all because of a simple "like" button.