Texts reveal teenager pressured her "boyfriend" to commit suicide

Cop-out response.

Each of those inventions did, as predicted, both giveth and taketh away.

Also, people are more than capable of evaluating social media use on its own merits, without lumping it in with the rest of the prior developments.

 

I admit it. I'm old and don't understand it. So explain it to me: What is the appeal of documenting every moment in your day? Life without "likes" goes on just fine. Really.

 

The most annoying, but comparatively harmless, spawn of social media: Dedicated hash tags for weddings.

 

It's actually quite functional. It allows you to click the hashtag and see all of the photos from that event on one page, rather than combing through a bunch of different pages to find photos.

 

People are naming their weddings.

It's annoying.

 

So does life with "likes."

 

What's it like to be bothered about everything, all the time?

 

But a lot of people live for those Likes and think they're doing it wrong if they don't get enough. So yeah, life goes on, but people do change to meet that need to be judged Like-worthy.

And not for nothing, but since we're talking about it on this particular thread, in this extreme example the boy's life did not go on because the girl wanted Likes.

 

I wouldn't know.

 

Your point is well-taken, though I think that's pretty debatable. I don't know if she calculated this to garner sympathy, a la Jackie. It may have just been an after-the-fact benefit she realized was hers for the taking.

 

Someone taking a billion pictures of their kids, or their food, or parties, or whatever, and posting them in hopes of getting a lot of "likes" ranks near the bottom of the long list of harmful and ridiculous things about social media.

Your extreme example has nothing to do with living life through a camera-phone lens. It's pretty garden-variety attention-whoring. Even still, that's nowhere close to the reason the boy's life did not go on.

 

Eh, I disagree. I think it had a lot to do with it from the standpoint of the girl's motivation.

Regardless, as with a lot of social media and the new age (cheating on your spouse, getting insanely angry at sportswriters, etc.), seeking that approval by attention-whoring is just a lot easier to do and more instantaneous than it ever used to be. So I don't think it's the same old behavior just with new tools, because there's more reward for it now.