Why do we put up with Social Media?

By: Sara Nesbitt 

Staff Writer 

If it is talk to family, complain about your ex-best friend, or stalk people by looking at their pictures– social media is an unavoidable part of our lives.

Or is it?

Facebook has over 1 billion users, Twitter has 500 million–it might seem like everybody is on these networks. Some users might not be as excited about social media as you think, and some aren’t even using it at all.

Senior Heather Campbell deals with this because she would have nothing to do with Facebook if it wasn’t for her friends and family overseas. She lived in New Zealand last year, and talks to her friends there through Facebook– but she can’t avoid getting distracted.

“I spend a lot of time on it just doing nothing.” Campbell says, then added, “I also hate how everything is so public.”

Junior Isabela Aznar has a similar situation. “Social media is important to my life because it’s how I talk to my family in Mexico a majority of the time,” she said.

Aznar also had her objections. “I don’t like how self-centered social media can make people, and how it has made people less social and less active.”

Some people take these problems so seriously that they deactivate their account — or never sign up in the first place.

Junior Dalena Bui had recently deleted her Facebook account saying, “I only go on there to waste time.”

However, for all the negativity about social media, some people are using it in productive ways.

Andy Carvin, a senior project manager for online communities working for NPR, is a big fan of Twitter, and other social media networks. Carvin uses social media to decipher things all over the world posting pictures, videos, or status’ on Twitter asking to public for their input. He has over 85,000 followers, and they all help him with his job by contributing their thoughts, ideas and actions.

Without social media, his job would not exist, and all of his important discoveries wouldn’t exist either.

So you use Facebook to talk to family, Twitter to complain about your ex-best friend, or try to avoid  both altogether– there’s no way to ….