In today’s time social media has a big influence on our lives, anything you want to do, you can promote it on social media. It has such a huge impact that we end up with social media personalities and influencers.
Genz is the generation born in the years (1997 - 2012) i.e. 10 to 25 years old. This generation has mostly grown up on social media Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, and TikTok, because which 16-year-old uses Facebook anyways?
Social media started becoming so popular and influential that the rise of social media personalities, makeup influencers, health and fitness influencers, and many more started coming up. They make a living off of this, by having a certain number of followers. They start getting paid for posting and brands want to start collaborating because of the following they have on their platform.
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There are thousands of aspiring, talented content creators who do not have any recognition. That brings us to the next point: many people just refer to their work on social media as content creation and themselves as ‘content creators. Content creation is the contribution of information to any media, especially digital media, for an end-user/audience in specific contexts.
Some of the biggest social media personalities which I’m certain you’ve heard of such as 16-year-old Charli D’Amelio and 21-year-old Addison Rae. They started by posting dancing TikToks and now they have their clothing lines, makeup companies, an acting debut, a singing debut, and whatnot because of the recognition they have.
There’s another thing that has been trending since the uproar of social media during the covid-19 pandemic, which is the ‘CRINGE CULTURE’: to feel disgusted or embarrassed. Cringe culture does not harm someone but over some time, its use has increased so much and has turned into hate comments, even though if one person finds something cringe it does not mean everyone does as well. Until now this article only consisted of the good parts of social media, but that’s not just it of course. Everything has its pros and cons.
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The hate, no matter how famous someone gets THEY ARE BOUND TO GET HATE, it can be in the form of abusive threats and provoking messages or comments, and sometimes it can be in the form of hate comments that become extreme to a point it makes someone self-deprecating. In a Hulu show ‘The D’Amelio show’ we constantly see Charli and Dixie having severe panic attacks and mental breakdowns because of social media.
It's bad, it's toxic and it most certainly isn’t for everyone, a person needs to have the mental capacity to deal with hate and criticism to go in this line of work.
Everything has its pros and cons; you just have to be careful. Social media has made a huge positive impact in many industries around the world, and it will continue to do so. On the other hand, it has its dangers and predators, and toxic side. It is the age of social media that we live in.
Authored by: Sehaj Kaur
Edited by: Ashutosh Bhoria