There's a really good book that's set in the future and describes how young people will basically be screwed because of social media. I'm talking about Super Sad True Love Story. After I read it, I took a scan through my younger brother's facebook and realized that the author of the above book may actually be onto something.
Has anyone ever known someone who is constantly telling you how pretty you look and you come to realize that the sole reason that they are doing this is so that they get a compliment back? I knew a few people like this in college. Anytime you would part your hair differently (no matter how bad you actually looked), these people would say that the LOVED your new hairstyle. Then you would watch their face and realize that they were waiting for the return compliment.
This is how young people today are, times a billion. Go and look at any 16-year-old girl's facebook page. A majority of the profile pictures are just them, hand on hip, chest puffed out pose. A majority of those pictures were self-taken. Almost all of them have a trail of comments telling the person how attractive they are. "OMG.....sooooooo hott!" "Girl, you are beautiful." "Sexy thang!" "You are too cute, I love you." This constant feeding of compliments is probably leading us to an overly confident and overly entitled youth. It's also leading us to a youth that's compliment needy. (Also, what is up with the misspellings? Hot has one "t" and thang is not a word)
In the book Super Sad True Love Story, there are these things called Onion Skin jeans. They are translucent pants. Women wear them in the book to get compliments on their lady bits. Does it really seem that unbelievable that people who are so used to getting multiple daily compliments on their appearance would have to keep upping the ante on sex appeal? I mean, have you seen how teenagers dress? Onion skin jeans may not be too far in the future.
How does all of this fit into dating? Well, can you imagine dating someone who is so compliment needy. I'd imagine a dinner conversation to go something like this:
Girl: John Doe, you look hot. I love your hair. Did you gel it? Haha.
Boy: Yeah, gel. You look hot too. Haha.
Girl: I got a new dress. Do you like my hair? Your hair looks so hot gelled and spiky. Haha.
Boy: Haha. Your hair looks hot. I love you. I love that dress on you, I can see your tits.
Girl: Do you like them? I sent my girlfriend a picture on facebook and she said I looked sexy.
Boy: Haha. You do look sexy and hot.
Not exactly the building blocks of a great relationship. Also, the haha thing slays me. I think it's the "like" for the new generation.
I feel bad for youth. They really don't stand a chance for healthy, normal relationships until they become less dependent on social media for communication.
2 comments:
I'll go right ahead and thank Anne H. for this blog post. She gave me the idea for this one.
I think that you also need to thank me since I recently brought this book up to you. J/K.
As I was telling you I recently heard the author of SSTLS on Fresh Air. One really interesting thing that he said was about how now days, everyone is all about self-expression. Everyone wants to be a writer and is constantly churning out facebook posts about their feelings every single second, but people don't really think and take in what they're reading. No one actually sit down to read a book anymore and just internalize and think about what they are reading. It's all about just throwing it out there, and like you said getting these really fake comments back from facebook friends.
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