Compared to most people in society, I would describe my online footprint as being average. I have a Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram account that I use frequently but spend more of my time on Instagram and Snapchat.
My social media sites mostly consist of posts about my family, friends, traveling, golf career, and my time in college. When I put my name into Google, mostly pictures of me in golf tournaments showed up and a few pics of me from my Instagram along with my Instagram username as well, so people must link my account to golf when they visit it and know I use Instagram most frequently. If a future employer was to look me up, they would know I took a sport very seriously and that I'm close to my family along with loving to travel by clicking on my Instagram handle in the search engine. As far as personal information, I have not given out too much accept for my phone number and email on Facebook but I have always been very cautious about putting that kind of information out there on sites because I know once it is, there is no taking it back. When I first created my Facebook account, I didn't mind giving out my email and phone number because it seemed harmless and innocent me was thinking what an easy way for my friends to have my contact information. If I knew what I know now and how scary it is to give these sites access to that kind of information, I would never have done it.
In my opinion, social media can make people feel lonely and depressed because it's a place where people can gloat about their lives. More often than not, it's staged but it still makes others feel depressed about their lives. For example, I had a friend once that hated going on Instagram and seeing all these girls post pics with their boyfriends because it made her wish she had one and question why she is lonely. It's not healthy and the thing that people don't understand is that most of the time it is not how it seems. Yes the girls might be posting cute pics with their boyfriends, but some of those relationships are not how they appear on Instagram. Another example, are Instagram models that have the perfect bodies and perfect lives which often makes people feel self conscious and depressed but the photos are so edited it's not realistic and their so called "perfect lives" are often staged. I remember awhile ago an Instagram model made a youtube video talking about this topic and explaining why she deleted her Instagram. She talked about how she was tired of going to the extreme length all the time to stage her life and editing her posts to the point where she didn't feel like herself. She mentioned at one point she knew it had gotten bad when she would just put on a dress go somewhere nice to take a picture to post and drive home just to make it look like she was living the life when in reality she was home in sweats watching tv.
A lot of times we don't realize how scary social media really is but after reading all these articles about how they steal your information and people have killed themselves over depression caused by stuff on these sites, I am not sure I want to be a part of it anymore.
