Is ‘The Dark Tower’ Worth Watching?

 

 

What If social media didn’t exist?

Social media has significantly increased throughout the years. But have you ever sat and wondered how life would be if we didn’t have social media? Social media changed society but for better or worse? If social media never came into the picture, then the inference that life would be simpler could be made. If social media didn’t exist it is more likely that people would have less social comparison and be more confident in themselves. Without social media platforms less fake news and rumors would be spread around and cyberbullying would never abuse anyone. There would be negative effects if the platforms were never existent, for example, businesses and brands would struggle drastically to market themselves. However, brands and businesses would have adapted to promote their products just as they did it in the 1900s before social media. Using TV commercials or billboards or as simple as business cards, three ways to solve the marketing with no social media issue. What if social media never took over our screens, the Earth would be at a more peaceful and a simpler state, minus the fake news, minus the social comparison, minus the cyberbullying, unfortunately minus the online promoting but, old school promotion worked for hundreds of years prior, why wouldn’t it work now!

The world would have been simpler without social media downgrading the confidence of most. When people see an Instagram post or snapchat story, mentally they compare their insecurities to the social media content, an example would be found in the article ‘How can we minimize Instagram’s harmful effects?’ by Zara Abrams. Abrams points out how Instagram users tend to use the platform for acceptance on how exciting their life is, how their body is built, or how a user’s character is seen by the social media society. Instead of giving positive feedback, social media users form negative outcomes, decreasing their self-esteem. This is most found common in teenagers and high school, students typically compare their insecurities to their classmate’s social media post, and social media is where students post their best selves.

There would also be more in person interactions with the absence of social media, due to confidence being lost and replaced by texting through social media electronically. Robert Carr goes in to detail about his own personal experiences on how avoiding human interactions using social media is becoming more and more common. In the article ‘9 Reasons Why Everyone is Always Looking at Their Phone’ Carr introduces the idea of looking at a phone to avoid interacting with other people around us. With the existence of online social platforms people avoid interacting with other humans and rather interact via the internet, they’ve become complete robots and glued to their screens, forgetting how a conversation works face to face. If social media were to not exist humans would be confident humans of emotion, not faceless robots with no confidence.

Social media has been used an unacceptable number of times as a bridge to allow users to spread misinformation as well as rumors that lead to cyberbullying. If social media platforms were to have never existed, there would have been no fake news that confuse and inform civilians into believing lies about our society. Mark Travers explained on how this occurred when more then 57% of Trump supporters were givin misinformation a month prior to the 2016 election via Facebook. The article ‘Facebook Spreads Fake News Faster Than Any Other Social Website, According To New Research’ by Travers goes more into detail about how the social media platform, Facebook pointed users into websites full of misinformation about the 2016 election candidates. If Facebook and the rest of the internet platforms were inexistant, people would rely on more reliable sources with creditable writers for news like the newspaper and the radio instead of internet posts where anyone can spread rumors and misinformation.

 Cyber bullying would have disappeared along with the social media platforms, without the internet platform for cyber abusers to reach victims, the attackers are weaponless. The article written by the Cambridge University Prep named, ‘Cyberbullying and its impact on young people's emotional health and well-being’ goes into great detail on the impacts that cyberbullying has on the well beings and emotional health’s of victims. The university acknowledges multiple forms of cyberbullying, forms that would never occur if social media were to never be invented. These several ways that cyberbullying occurs insists of flaming: the electronic dissemination of insulting or furious messages; harassment: delivering derogatory or threatening communications on a regular basis;  cyberstalking: threatening or intimidating someone online; disparaging: making fun of others, spreading unkind rumors; masquerading: providing facts while posing as someone else in order to harm someone's reputation; outing: disclosing private details about someone that were previously spoken in confidence; Exclusion: intentionally excluding someone from an online group, such a chat room or game, and ganging up on one person. Victims of all these different strategies of cyberbullying would not have to hold that fear if the platforms were nonexistent.

There is no doubt that without social media, businesses would struggle with marketing. Most if not all successful businesses use their social media platforms to market their products, famous examples of products being advertised on social media consist of the fast food restaurant, ‘Wendy’s’ advertising their combo meals on their Twitter account, the alcohol beverage ‘Guinness’ twitting an add for their drinks and cans, and ‘Samsung’ using twitter to launch their new Galaxy Watch 4, alerting and informing their customers about the new products coming out soon. If social media never existed, businesses would take a massive blow success wise, however they could easily revert to old advertising methods. Sagar Joshi stated in his article ‘History of Advertising 101: What You Need to Know’ the tactics that were used during the ‘Golden Age’ (1900s through 2000) to promote products before internet social media took over advertisement. He brought up how radio ads were extremely popular which was then followed by TV advertising and newspapers. Without the exist of social media, businesses could easily adapt to these old methods replacing social media campaigns.

If social media was removed from society today, there would be drastic parts of life impacted but not necessarily negative changes. The idea of cyberbullying would be terminated, and the issue would be completed resolved, humans would start acting like humans again having their human interactions with each other face to face. The average teenager and person would stop looking down on themselves due to an absence of social media stars or fakers to compare to, and even if business cant refer to typical social media campaigns and ads, world-wide commercials would be promoted through radios across the world, television across the states, and news papers across the cities. The absence of social media would break the chains and free their users from these online issues and create society to work like humans again, not ai robots.