Quickly think of all the social media sites you use. My number, sadly, is eight, and I’d consider myself a social media novice. How is that possible? It’s because we don’t typically think of some of the sites we use as being social media. Twitter, Google, Facebook, Wikipedia, Last.fm, YouTube, Flickr, Reddit, MySpace, Pinterest, Yelp, Live Journal, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Foursquare, WordPress, StumbleUpon, Digg, Formspring.me and Instagram are just a few of the most popular ones these days.
The purpose of many of these sites is to provide a sense of community and connect individuals from all over the globe. It should be making people feel more in tune with the world and provide the means to have a variety of options and opinions at their fingertips. But honestly, it doesn’t. What’s the point of it all? And now new “innovators” have been coming up with even more ideas to get in on the action.
Recently, the new social media site “At the Pool” has been gaining some attention, so I decided to get in on it for myself.
Making an account was simple enough. It requires you to log into your Facebook account and transfers all your information over — as if that’s not weird or anything. You’re then required to upload five photos and fill out some questions describing yourself. Then, you choose topics you’re interested in, such as “working out,” “local food” or “travel.” But why does this all matter? It takes your information and matches it with people in your area, or at your school, so you can meet a new friend or potential lover.
Browsing through I kept coming back to the same question: what’s the point of this?
The site is practically useless. No, website, I am not interested in meeting people from my rival school. So while browsing these scum devil profiles, I felt like a really big creep — I don’t know anything about these people and will probably never talk to them in real life, but I know they like to surf and travel. It reads very much like a Match.com or eHarmony type of site, which again, is peculiar because they’re targeting younger generations and focusing on forming friendships. What happened to the old days when we actually went outside to meet new people?
With the influence of social media sites, meeting friends changed from going out and meeting people through clubs, work, classes or other social gatherings to sitting and staring at a computer. What’s going to happen to campus life if everyone is meeting each other online instead of in real life?
It’s an odd concept to think about. Coming in as a freshman, you probably knew a few people — maybe from high school — or no one at all if you came from out-of-state. Within the past few years, Facebook pages for residence halls have become prevalent. Incoming students have been able to start meeting each other ahead of time and “friending” everyone on the page.
OK, they’re excited, which is understandable. But now imagine if people made accounts specifically to meet people with similar interests. Where’s the fun? The drama? The excitement? This is the pitfall of social media these days: it’s less about actually being social and more about faking it.
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