Daily Dose of English 192
Social Media
Daily Dose of English 192
Intermediate
Hey everyone, my name is Ben and you're listening to a Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you could make it today. In this episode, we're going to be talking about social media, which is a very big topic and I'm not going to be able to really cover it in 10 minutes or give any good insights. Uh, so I just want to talk a bit about my experience with it and how I use it and that sort of thing. I think I've talked about something similar before, but it's hard to remember what I've done at this point over 192 episodes. But in my mind, There's a couple different kinds of media online. There's content media and then there's social media. Social media is things like Facebook, Instagram, even Twitter, where the goal is to interact, the main purpose is to interact with other users and the other people there, so that social part. Something like YouTube or live streaming like Twitch, I don't see as a social media, even though arguably it could be, since the purpose is not to interact with somebody necessarily, but to engage with something that somebody else has made or is making. There's a slightly different vibe that I get from them, even though they're pretty similar. There's also other things that I don't know exactly how they define in there. So something like Discord, for example, fits a lot of the same ideas as other social media things. However, it's organized in a way that feels very different from what I call the mainstream social media. Um, and so when I talk about social media, I, I'm not specifically talking about things like YouTube, Twitch, Tik TOK, discord. I'm, I mean like the, the. Social networking apps, Twitter, uh, Facebook, Instagram, that sort of thing. Those are, those are the big ones. Um, but any, everybody could have a different definition. And if you do have a different definition or you see it differently, I'm very curious to hear what your thoughts are. Um, This sort of social media, like that network effect social media thing, I pretty much don't use at all. I've never been a person to use Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, things like that. have just never worked for me. I've tried sometimes, like I technically have an account on some platforms, but usually I made them when somebody specific asked me to, and then I just couldn't get into it. So like the example of Snapchat, I said that was really big when I was in high school. And everybody would talk on Snapchat. And at one point, somebody asked me, he's like, oh, do you have a Snapchat? You should make one. It's like, oh, no, I don't. And I'm just like, all right, I'll try, I guess. I made one and I didn't ever use it. Like, it just wasn't, it didn't make sense to me. I didn't like how it wasn't logical. Like, it didn't, it's like, you're supposed to, if you want to just message somebody, just message them. You have a text service, just use that, right? Um, and so that's, that's what happened with a lot of them, but they just don't really make sense to me. I don't engage with them. Um, and they don't fit with, with the way that I like to live, I guess you could call that morals or whatever it is. because I also see a lot of, or I feel a lot of positive effects from not engaging with social media in my life because I really don't feel like I'm missing anything. The most, the one that I did actually use for quite a while was Reddit. Um, there was probably a full year or two where I was, I was using Reddit daily. I was very frequent. I was reading a lot of things, watching a lot of things, whatever it is, using Reddit often. Um, and I, that's really where I realized like sort of why I don't like these sorts of things, why they feel very, um, in a lot of ways, addictive. They feel like they're stealing attention, right? They're a huge time waste and time sink for something that does not benefit me at all. And when I eventually completely just stopped with Reddit, I was realizing that I was wasting time that I didn't want to be wasting and I was not getting anything out of it. So I just completely stopped using Reddit. And that change was only positive for my life. And that is really where I realize that social media, for me, is purely negative. There are some useful tools in there, but like... It's really hard to... I don't know. It's like looking at the ingredients on ice cream and being like, oh, there's a little bit of that in there. That means it's a good food because that's a good thing. And that good thing is in all of these other bad things. So that's good, right? That logic obviously doesn't hold up, right? If there's a couple of good things within a large bad thing, that doesn't make the bad thing then good, right? And so that's how Like I see all this, because the things of like being connected, nice messaging, sharing images, that sort of thing is positive, right? There are good things in there, but the effect that it creates in the way that it gets people to waste so much time, I think is very negative. And I think a really good example of that is in older people using Facebook. because a lot of older people are very, very, very into Facebook and so many different things on Facebook. And even though that that's not something that they grew up with, and it can become to get to a point where it's almost a problem for their, their whatever functioning or their free time, like not It's just, it becomes a very strange relationship with a lot of people and Facebook, despite the possibility of Facebook being just positive, right? Staying in contact with friends, getting updates, things like that can be a positive thing, but it definitely spirals out of control for many, many people. And actually the same goes for non-social media things, what I call content media, which is things like YouTube, TikTok, Twitch, that sort of thing. I also definitely see negative effects in those, but I choose to engage with YouTube and some Twitch. I do not want to touch TikTok. All the short form content really seems to be a problem. I don't think there's any definitive answer or data or anything saying that it is bad for you necessarily. The amount of people that I know that will just spend two to three hours on TikTok and be like, where did the time go? Makes me just feel like there's something wrong. It's like, I'm not saying that it isn't exactly a bad thing, but that to me sets off alarm bells. It's like, okay, if people are like losing hours and they're feeling worse after doing it, that seems like a problem. Um, like it's just, I just don't want to touch it. I want to stay away from it. Um, I have a similar, I have had similar issues with YouTube in the past. I think I've talked about it before. Um, like watching essentially too much or not being able to stop. Um, but I'm aware of that. I've actually gotten a lot better with it. I've been more specific and, um, purposeful with the way that I engage with it. And that's been very, very helpful for me. Um, and. Yeah, and like that sort of has to do with a lot of things where a little bit is fine, but too much is not good. And so I think that's where a lot of these sit. But yeah, social media, specifically the ones about social stuff. I've just never been for me. They don't really make sense. I don't like them. I don't want to spend time on them. I'd much rather spend time on other projects or watching something that's hundreds of hours went into, like a movie or a TV show, instead of something that's really, I don't want to say low quality, but of a different quality. However, I will say that there is a lot of comedy in short form stuff. But what I do is I let other people find the funny ones, compile them into videos, and then watch those. So like meme compilations or whatever are fun. I quite enjoy them. But they are... But I'm not going to spend the time just sifting through literally thousands of TikToks to find one funny one. I have seen, I'm going a little bit off on a tangent here, but I've known a couple of people that have been very into watching TikToks and they will sometimes want to show me them. And a couple times, they'll be like scrolling and they just scroll past things without... I'm not able to visually process what I'm seeing. And often it's like, okay, I'm done with this now, I say to them. And they go, okay, just one more funny one, one more funny one. And it takes a long time to find one that is even a little bit funny. Like the percentage of good TikToks out there is so incredibly low, which is really surprising for me. It really feels like you're looking at garbage, even though there are some good ones in there. But anyways, I'm going off on a tangent. I don't need to keep going with this. This has been a 10-minute episode. Crazy how fast the time goes sometimes. I hope that you, I don't know, enjoyed this. If you did, leave a comment down below with your thoughts. I'm definitely curious on, um, how you use social media, how you see it, um, what your definition is and all that stuff, you know? Um, but that's it all. That's all that that's, that's everything for me. I'll see you again tomorrow. Have a good one. Bye.
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