Goodbye, Instagram Likes!
Instagram has become one of the widest used social media networks in the world. Approximately 1 billion users connect daily. Users mostly connect via their mobile phones and spend an average of one hour per day according to recent data.
Although you may have many social media networks at your disposal, Instagram has become particularly popular among you people, in particular anyone under the age of 35.
Most users upload daily photos to the net trying to get as many likes as possible and the admiration of their followers. Today children no longer want to be firefighters, doctors or astronauts, they want to be youtubers or influences. The digital world fever has reached such an extreme that it causes all kinds of anxieties and mental health problems among its impressionable users.
The phenomenon has even led to the creation of new words to help understand it. Take for instance, FOMO, the fear of missing out. FOMO is the fear of missing something when everyone else is doing it. It is present in young people, under the age of 30, and stands out for the feeling of anxiety, when flicking through our contacts photos and fearing not being included in their exciting social life. It is characterised by the need to be connected, in real time, to everything that happens in their social network in every moment.
Narcissism and social networks
Being continuously connected to social media networks prevents you from enjoying the reality that surrounds you. Appearance, popularity, recognition has become an obsession.
Instagrammers are trying so hard to copy celebrities and the lifestyle they lead that they end up spending hours on trying to stage the ideal photo and edit it. The purpose of this narcissistic tendency is to build a virtual life that seems perfect but it is done to such an extent that it becomes this obsession that many users decide to buy followers, or even worse some have died trying to take the perfect selfie.
All this madness to please others and seek their recognition has caused the Royal Society Public Health to consider Instagram the worst valued network due to the effect it has on the mental health of young people trying to reach popularity and show a perfect facade towards others.
There is no way to tell if this has anything to do with the company’s decision to eliminate likes. Perhaps the strategy is aimed at calming the anxiety of these users.
