That is a question isn’t it. In trying to build a business it is about as serious a question as Hamlet’s original. Not to social media is akin to putting a full stop to the business. To social media seems to be toil and strife to keep up with the demands of the algorithms. Just how often must one post to get noticed by the system and pushed into the feeds of the target audience? A YouTuber I have followed for years recently posted a video about the difference between a corporate brand that can have a long, long lifespan and a personal brand that has to have a lifespan on a human scale. And not even just the length of a human life. Influencers can only go on for so long, before they get burnt out. A decade perhaps?
We can pivot a bit and ask whether our kids ought to social media or not to social media. Personally, our family has been in the camp of not to social media. So far, I think it was the right choice. We have three teenagers, one almost teen, and two youngers. The three teens got phones around age 15, when it really started getting tricky for them to navigate life without one. (The high schools use messaging apps to keep the kids informed on all their electives and extracurricular classes, and QR codes for links to websites.(On a related, but tangential note, they often put a non-clickable QR code in an email, instead of a string of text with a clickable link to the website. This I cannot understand. Am I supposed to take out my phone, while I am sitting at my computer, to scan the QR code to access the website on a tiny screen? But I digress…))
The three teens have phones, with texting and calling, and messaging apps, but no internet, no social media apps, no YouTube. They can use YouTube on computers at home. I’m a fan of YouTube, because you can just learn so much! Amazing tool. But the kids don’t need to be watching YouTube shorts with content of questionable accuracy 24/7. The friends of my almost-teen will all hang around staring at their phones watching YouTube shorts, while my kid wants to jump on the trampoline or play three flies up. Or, when they are playing, BeReal will ping one of them mid-throw, and they stop their game to take a photo…and never resume their game, because now they are scrolling in some app or another. Drives me and my almost-teen nuts. Let the kids stay little! Let them have fun IRL.
