Social Media: An 18-Year Old’s Perspective
By: Joe Mccormick
Tags: Business, Twitter, Instagram, Social Media, Tech

The expectation to use social media

I believe that the use of social media in school has become an unwritten rule for students. Out of the 180 people that were in my year-group at the end of Year 11 (Grade 10), there were only a few that didn’t have an Instagram account. While there are plenty of people in the year-group that have an Instagram account, but don’t post; the trend seems to be that the number of posts on a profile is proportional to the popularity of the person in the year-group — though there is bound to be some anomalies.

‘Popularity’ is a social hierarchy that is subconsciously taught to us at a young age. The fact that school students are often more worried about how they will be judged by people above them in the hierarchy is why I truly dislike the concept. I found myself wondering — is the popularity of an individual based on social media follower count; or is their social media follower count based on their popularity?

I lean more towards the latter point; which explains why younger teenagers are so keen to increase the number of followers they have on an app. The more popular a person is within a year-group, the more followers they have due to their bigger circle of friends. This furthermore increases the amount of posts that this person will publish, in order to receive validation on their popularity. This is backed up by the fact that the majority of the posts I see from students in my year-group are by those higher up the ladder in terms of popularity.

This is the evil game that social media plays with the minds of young people — though, it mainly applies to people earlier in the teenage years. As we get older and spend more time on these platforms, people tend to stop obsessing over the numbers like they used to. People post for the fun of it, but you can still see the journey of popularity reflected in their posts.

Photo by Charles Deluvio on Unsplash

18-year olds are no longer the best at social media

Instagram was released to the world in 2010; six years after the initial release of Facebook, and four years after Twitter. When Instagram was launched, it was clear that it was designed to appeal to young adults — as illustrated by the following research by Statista.

According to their research; 6.6% of Instagram’s one billion total users are between the ages 13 and 17; while 29% of users fit into the 18–24 age range. 35% of users fit into the 25–34 range; making it the largest group of users on the entire platform.

While the vast majority of Instagram users are between ages 18 and 34, the ability to use the platforms effectively (gaining regular followers and having a lot of engagement) seems to be adopted quicker by the younger users.

A great example of this would be the younger brother of a friend of mine. My friend’s brother has only just completed the first year of secondary school, but has over three-and-a-half times as many followers as his 18-year old sibling and myself.

My friend’s younger brother posts photos that don’t look any different to what we posted when we were his age, yet the follower-count is much higher than myself and a lot of my friends.

It fascinates me that somebody can start a new school, meet new people and find themselves in a totally different environment; but somehow have accumulated a follower count almost half the size of our school’s population in just a few months! This seems to be the effect of growing up with social media being a part of your childhood; rather than coming home from school and playing Mario Kart like I did…