Vanity on social media

People share sad videos about abandoned puppies and homeless people, or about global warming and cancer or they try to make people feel guilty for not sharing posts.


Graphic by Joshua Awolade
Graphic by Joshua Awolade

I am on Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr seven days a week for a couple of hours every day. Every time I log on I see posts about some cause people have shared and are talking about.

People share sad videos about abandoned puppies and homeless people, or about global warming and cancer or they try to make people feel guilty for not sharing posts.

It occurred to me that every time I see one of these posts, it may just be a reason for people to garner attention for themselves.

I saw people who shared ALS Ice Bucket Challenge videos, but never actually did the challenge themselves.

To me, this is an attention-seeking tactic, where people share information about a cause, but won’t do anything about it themselves. They share seemingly in the hope that someone else will see it and do something about it so they don’t have to.

The Internet is a beautiful place and pretty much anything you can imagine is online somewhere, but more importantly, it’s a place where information can be shared far and wide in only a matter of seconds by clicking your mouse.

There are so many avenues for people who want to help make the world a better place, such as websites like Change.org or other websites for charitable organizations.

However, more often than not I see people posting information about one cause or another without seeing them rally to it.

It’s one thing to post a video about the issue of homelessness in our society today, but it’s another thing entirely to actually fight for the cause and really light a fire under the people who would normally turn the other cheek in the real world.

Many people today are guilty of this weird obsession with themselves and with an incessant need to get attention from people, up to a point where they make it seem like they are sympathetic towards a cause just so people will tell them how brave they are or how awesome it is that they are supporting something.

In reality they are simply doing it to deceive others into believing they are a part of something important.

The Internet is a gift but it doesn’t seem like many people are using it as a force of good.

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