I interviewed one of my close friends, who I thought would have a very different experience than me when it came to social media. He is very social and is almost always with a lot of friends, so I figured he would be pretty active on social media, but he tends to keep things pretty private when it comes to sharing parts of his life with others. It turned out that we are actually pretty similar in almost aspect in regard to social media.
He checks it less often than I do, but not by too much. We both tend to check our social media when we’re bored or feel like we have nothing to do; however, he’s a lot busier than what I am, so his time that he has to check it is less than the time that I have. He said that he definitely checks his social media multiple times everyday, but that he posts very little, if ever (he has a total of 2 Instagram posts). Similarly, I check my social media a lot more than I actually post on it.
We also both keep our different forms of social media as private as we can. Not only do we both set the privacy settings, but we also try to manage who we allow to follow our accounts. He said he knows almost every person that he allows to follow all of his forms of social media, but that he does follow a few celebrities or accounts that he doesn’t know personally. On the other hand, I don’t follow a single person that I do not know personally or have some sort of knowledge of who they are. For the most part though, we are both very similar in our attitudes toward privacy.
Where our behaviors differ the most is when it comes to the types of social media that we use. I solely have and use Instagram and snap chat while he uses Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and snap chat. He said that his social media use has definitely increased as he’s gotten older; he started with just Facebook, but once high school hit, he was then into almost every form of social media so that he could keep up with friends who no longer go to school with him (our schools split in middle school). I never really cared about social media or keeping up with people that I went to elementary school with.
It’s interesting how little correlation there seems to be between being “social” (as your friend is in real life) and using social media. It sounds as if your friend like to keep track of buddies who aren’t around but otherwise can basically take or leave it. After a certain point, as we’ve noted, social media use can eat into your time for real-life social contact and fun.