Social Media - Changing Humanity?

The episode begins with Leslie sharing her own love/hate relationship with social media, especially when it comes to her businesses. Managing a business social media can be frustrating specifically with the constant struggle of trying to stay in the confines of the platform’s algorithm. Leslie shares how her planner business has nineteen thousand followers, but her posts are only being shown to about a thousand of them! The day-to-day social media use can also bring conflicting emotions, Leslie shares that the average digital consumer spends about two and a half hours per day on social media!

Leslie shares some of her experiences with the various social media platforms that are sparking her children’s interest and also her oldest child’s desire for his own cell phone. Leslyn points out that there is always something that is going to be distracting to children and today’s is the vast options that the Internet provides. This does not undermine the fact that there seems to be strong correlations to social media and electronic addictions, which Leslie and Leslyn plan to discuss in more detail in a future episode.

Most people who think of the Internet’s impact would say that they think it is more of a positive because of its ability to connect people. Leslyn gives the example of being able to connect with cousins that she would know nothing about otherwise, as they live on the opposite side of the country. Leslie on the flip side states that the more she thinks critically about these social media connections, the more she wonders. She wonders why she feels the need to be connected to people she has not seen or spoke to since high school. Leslyn believes this could be up to voyeurism and compares Leslie’s example to feeling the same way about the people who sit and watch to see what their neighbors are up to. The reason that you want to be friends with a person on social media is because people love to watch people, and the curiosity of knowing about a vague connection in your life is what social media counts on! Leslyn continues this by comparing it to going to a class reunion. People often go to class reunions not only to catch up but to compare and observe others we are vaguely connected to.

We do this because as humans, we have a fundamental instinct to be curious. Leslie shares that the major reason she hired someone to manage her businesses’ social medias was because of social medias drive to comparisons, she feels, personally, that this is one of the single biggest drawbacks. Leslie found herself comparing her work to others in both good and bad ways. This was an attitude that she did not want to have as it either made her feel horrible or gave her this sense of superiority that she did not appreciate or want in herself.

Leslyn on the other hand, does not share those similar feelings. Leslyn shares that she has a personal Facebook page that she does not connect with clients on, which is part of creating good psychological boundaries. Leslyn also has two public pages one for her counseling practice and the other as she’s an author. She is incredibly particular about what she allows others to see of her in a public setting as this is vastly different from what her friends see. Leslie also shares some of these techniques, as she has a personal social media page and her businesses’ pages. For Leslie, she feels that the multiple different roles she plays in life complicate and make it tricky to run individual social media pages.

With the use of social media, there is something to be said about posting in a way that reflects your most authentic self, whatever that may be, and giving people the ability to interact with little to no pretense. Leslyn shares this is crucial in her work as she wants her future clients to have a perception of her as a blank slate which helps in a psychotherapy setting. Leslie asks what Leslyn sees most in her practice related to social media. Leslyn answ