Held Hostage by Social Media

By Anonymous / Fall 2022

Roughly nine years ago, I remember the beaming grin that spread across my older sister’s face, a loving smile that embraced the warmth of the sun, as she received a brand new Apple iPhone 6 for her birthday. My younger brother and I were fascinated by the slick new features and upgraded camera qualities, but ultimately opted to return to our ongoing game of Mario Party Wii. However, when it reached my sister’s turn, she was nowhere in sight. We dashed through the open door to her room to find her installing two social media apps of Instagram and Snapchat onto her phone, apps that my brother and I came to loathe in the next few weeks. Each time we entered her room from that day on, she would be commenting on her friends’ Instagram posts, throwing up peace signs, and retaking photos for her potential posts before yelling at us that we were interrupting her. Her abnormal response of “No, I’m busy” to our requests of playing video games or going outside together left us in shock and disappointment as we slumped away. More days passed and the open gateway to my sister‘s room slowly transformed into an iron-gated wall that stood between our reality and my sister’s reality of social media.

A few things I began to notice with my sister after downloading social media was the difference in her appearance. She started wearing more makeup and stylish outfits whenever she left to go outside the house and would often ask me whether she looked good or not, to which I would sarcastically reply, “I don’t care”. I was forced to become her personal photographer and took photos over and over as she made different poses. At a certain point, she was researching different workouts and fitness routines in order to be skinnier despite already being relatively skinny. I was told by my mother that it was a matter of my sister going through puberty and her wanting to act more like an adult, but my twelve-year-old self knew that this was a bigger problem than that. I was losing my sister to an obsession of popularity and self comparison to others caused by an aftereffect of social media.

One day, she had left her phone unsupervised and I scrolled through her Instagram profile to see that she had amassed an estimate of 3,500 followers with an average range of 800-900 likes per post. When I confronted her about how she knew all these people, she claimed that they were Internet friends and random people who wanted to follow her social platform. I found myself to be really concerned and in awe as to how she managed to meet so many people through social media but decided not to say anything about it to her, a major mistake and regret on my part. As she engaged in conversations with her online “friends”, a lot of drama, gossip, and rumors arose and I would often stumble upon numerous occasions of her crying late at night. Any attempts made by me or my brother to communicate with her and discuss what was wrong was always ignored in a cold manner. Having to witness my older sister’s bright and uplifting character gradually decline into a reclusive state of depression and self-hatred was incredibly heartbreaking and difficult for me to watch.

From our viewpoint, the only viable option was to delete her social media as it was taking too much of a toll on her mental health. Despite her initial actions of resistance towards the idea, her realization and recounts of spending time with us ultimately changed her decision. Days turned into months and her old self began to slowly reappear as she was able to go through life without any distractions of likes, followers, and social media status. I’m so grateful that I was able to get my sister back, but this experience also makes me fearful of how many other people are out there struggling with the toxicity of the internet and social media.

In the world we live in today, technological innovations have allowed us to advance in major ways of communication, but the overall reality of social media has caused a loss of human interaction, increased signs of anxiety and depression, and online addiction among people starting from early adolescence. Especially with our generation, we are currently experiencing a world built around the mainframes of social media as a basis of communication. In my example, social media created this sense of disconnection between my sister and I as she no longer spent time with those around her in pursuit of seeking attention from others that weren’t physically present. I often picture this idea as people walking around with their phones in front of their eyes as they are “blinded” by the distractions of social media. With new apps such as Tik Tok and BeReal becoming such a widespread tool for entertainment purposes, we are instantly able to gather new information regarding the activities that our friends, family, or celebrities post. In many ways, this translates into an endless loop as the moment we wake up to the minute we go to sleep, our first instinct is to check our phones and go on social media. Our minds get sucked into mindlessly scrolling through stories and posts and once we finally put our phones down, a considerable amount of time seems to have flashed by. We lose sight of living in the present and aren’t able to look deeply at ourselves and see how much of a negative impact it has on our mind and mentality.