Social Media Maven: Being Popular Is Not What It's Cracked Up To Be
MARINA DEL REY (CBSLA.com) -- A popular social media maven is revealing the painful truth behind the perfect poses. She says it's all an illusion. Now, she is on a mission to enlighten other teenagers about why online life is not real life.
Australian teen blogger, Essena O'Neill gets paid to post online. Now, she says she's had enough of what she calls an unhealthy lifestyle. And she's not alone.
Erica Solis works at chiropractor's office in Marina Del Rey. Her life recently underwent an adjustment—"a social media cleanse," she said.
This 20-something-year-old used to have about half a dozen social media accounts. Now, she only has two because she realized she was "spending too much time on them," Solis said.
O'Neill feels the same way. "I don't agree with social media as it currently is," she said.
The 18-year-old often got paid for product placement in her posts because the Australian blogger had half a million followers on Instagram plus 200,000 followers on Youtube and 60,000 more on Snapchat. She recently ditched those accounts.
The blogger said: "My point is, getting here wherever I am, is like half a million mark, or whatever, it does nothing. Nothing!"
Psychologists say a big part of personal development is our ability to pick up on social cues, like eye contact and body language. That quickly goes away when you limit yourself to what's inside the scene of an electronic device.
"The extent that people are buried in their devices, we're now raising a generation of people are training adults and kids not to look for social cues and not to respond in the moment to what's going on around them," said USC Professor of Social Media Karen North, Ph.D.
O'Neill said she used to be obsessed with how many views and likes she got on social media. So was Solis.
But at the end of the day, Solis said: "It doesn't matter how many likes you have. It doesn't matter how many people retweet your status. What matters is the people that are in your daily life."
