by Ayla Roback

As someone born in the mid-’90s and grew up in the ’00s, it is cool to be a part of the first generation to have the best of both worlds-- one without the Internet and social media, where we played outside with our friends until the street lamps came on, taking a couple of Razor scooters to the ankle along the way. Days spent playing board games, hanging out with my brother, filling up notebooks with ideas for inventions and cartoons that we were going to make us genius artists and inventors. We would come up with all of these crazy ideas because we were raised to entertain ourselves and never “be bored.” We believed we were radically different from anything that came before us and could accomplish anything we wanted to do. 

The other half of my childhood, the pre-teen and early teen years, were spent waiting on dial-up…

...learning to play around on Microsoft Paint and Oregon Trail in school, watching silly YouTube videos - emailing the link to your friends and LOLing back and forth, fostering online friendships through AIM, updating your MySpace, like the HTML fiend you are, to feature the coolest new graphics and music, and e-mailing. In middle school, we even started using the Internet to learn and do projects in school. Information became basically limitless to us. 

Now we’re posting silly videos and snaps of our days on Snapchat and Instagram stories to give our followers a peek at our day-to-day, reconnecting with old friends or family that we haven’t physically seen in ten-plus years, and sharing memories and our thoughts with people across the country from us. It is honestly amazing how far we have come. There is literally nothing that we cannot Google or find SOMEWHERE on the Internet. Odds are, if you can imagine it, someone has posted something-- a blog, a video, a status, a tweet, etc. about it before you or has an opinion on it. It really is amazing to see how far we have come as a society with all of the innovation and creativity that is shared on the Internet. #GlowUp

Have you ever wondered:

How do all these ‘Influencers’ and seemingly ‘ordinary’ people gain such a massive following? What is all the hype with posting on ‘stories’ Why do they (millennials) post so much of themselves? How does one even begin to build an aesthetic?

To answer a few questions about social media and building an online presence, I did a quick Q&A session with this month’s featured artist, Instagram maven Lauren Ladnier! 

Q: What is your favorite social media platform to communicate with, and why? 

A: Instagram. I love taking photos and thoroughly enjoy planning my content. I live in New York City and have such great photo opportunities here. I also work in fashion, so I love showcasing my style as well as others’. On Instagram, I feel like my followers have similar interests to me and a greater understanding of my personality. Sometimes I find it easier to communicate with pictures rather than words.

Q: Why do you think social media is the new way we prefer to communicate?

A: Social media is a fun, easy way to receive news but also see the content that caters to our specific interests. We tend to prefer this method when communicating because it feels personalized- we follow the people whose content we want to see and those who follow us are interested in the content we are creating.

Q: Where do you think social media may be going in the next five years?

A: Social media will inevitably start trying to sell more, ads will play a bigger role on social media across all platforms. I do believe social media is here to stay, but it will put more focus on selling products, unfortunately.

Q: What's your journey to utilizing social media to create an online presence?

A: When utilizing social media to create an online presence, it is extremely important to be yourself and also express yourself authentically. Authenticity is key.

Q: What are the five most important elements in developing your "presence" on social media?

A: The five most important elements in developing your presence on social media are: 

1) Be authentically you. 

2) People enjoy relatable content- people like to feel like they can relate to someone and once they feel this they tend to develop a sense of loyalty to that person.  However, at the same time, they like to see content that they can aspire to and are inspired by.

3) Creating quality content, but more importantly content that you enjoy creating.  I went through a phase where I only wanted to post very edited, tonal pictures with little color, the opposite of my personality.  I thought this was the cool thing to do, but found myself not posting pictures I took/liked because it didn't match my Instagram "aesthetic."  I eventually realized this was MY Instagram and should be posting content I wanted to post, content that made me happy- colorful pictures. Once I started doing this my follower count increased.  Sure you may lose some followers, but the followers you gain that enjoy your authentic content are more valuable anyway.

4) Creating a community of friends- both real-life friends, but also creating online friends is very important when trying to create a presence. When dealing with online friends, it's especially important to answer DMs (direct messages) and to be as friendly and as helpful as possible.  I find myself answering a lot of questions about things to do in New York City, as well as questions about the fashion industry and how I got started. Being kind and helping people can help create a more loyal following.

5) In terms of building your presence, getting "re-grammed or reposted" is extremely helpful because you reach a new audience. Sometimes when starting out, it's useful to post about smaller brands, brands that are more likely to reshare the content and you can reach a new audience that way.

So what is it, other than age and technology that sets millennials apart from other generations? Millennials as a whole are very nostalgic and relational, we strive for authenticity and crave it, but don’t quite know how to navigate it well. We are unique and we refuse to just blend in with those around us. We are generally more accepting racially, ethnically, and economically, and are all-around more diverse than previous generations. We are all about radical self-expression and “letting our freak flag fly” rather than fitting into a mold set ahead of us by our parents and grandparents. We are also a lot more open to change, accepting of things outside of the social norm, and a good majority of us are all about “smashing the patriarchy.” We want things to be fair and justice to prevail, even if that means causing an upset or disrupting the norm. And unlike previous generations, we have so much information and so many resources at our fingertips, we have to barely lift a finger to tap or swipe and accomplish our means and connect those of us that are like-minded.

We all know that Millennials are set apart as a generation, known for being very tech-centric. But did you know, according to a Pew Trends’ survey, conducted all the way back in 2010, even then three-quarters of Millennials had created a profile on a social networking site, compared with half of Xers? Then working backwards with 30% of Boomers and 6% of Silents with profiles. For Millennials, social media is not just a past-time, but the way that we communicate- actually sort of fused with our social life. We not only use social media to bond and communicate with our friends that we know IRL (in real life), but we also use social media to meet new “friends” that share common interests, play the same games or watch the same shows as us, or even just think the same cat gif is hilarious. We discuss politics, news, reality TV, sports, video games, movies, music, art, social justice… everything through social media and not always are these interactions with people that we actually know.

Social media is so intertwined with our offline lives that the two are almost completely fused now. Social media can negatively affect a job depending on how you are posting (a reference to Twitter’s clout-chasing or cancel culture), or it could help you get a job depending on your connections and how you are interacting in your posts and using your online presence. 

Social media can be an insight into who you genuinely are and what your interests are, or it can be a facade-- an online persona that you want people to perceive you as, or a little of both. That is one of the dangers of social media. People are constantly comparing and contrasting their lives with others that they follow on social media (this particular plight doesn’t discriminate across generations) and they are comparing- just a curated peek of someone's life that they see online rather than the whole person that actually exists.1 Samuel 16:7 (NLT) says: 

"...The Lord doesn’t see things the way you see them. People judge by outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart.”  

What do you base your self-worth and image on- the way people perceive you on social media, or the way that you were created: perfect and uniquely you?  I feel that one of the biggest issues that Millennials struggle within an almost always-connected world is: 

What is authenticity? Do we share simply to share our lives with our followers, or are we sharing things with an intention of following an aesthetic or an online persona? If we are sharing to follow an aesthetic or a persona, how does that negatively impact our self-worth and self-image when we don't measure up to that person that we aspire to be or fit the aesthetic we are creating? When we dig deep into some of our depression and anxiety disorders, could the way that we use social media be a possible root cause of those things? 

Overall, social media is a booming industry, especially with millennials, and is a trend that I don’t think is fading anytime soon. While there are some very dark sides of social media: cyber-bullying, catfishing, and human trafficking, but I believe that overall social media is a helpful and fun form of communication. Social media is a tool that in this "digital age," we all, millennials or not, really have to be able to navigate and use effectively. 

Resources

We’ve created a free downloadable PDF to explore the article deeper. It contains discussion questions about the topic in general terms that will give you a jumping-off point for beginning a conversation.

The second page contains a way to see the topic from a biblical perspective.

And finally, to go deeper into the subject, we have chosen a few curated resources to explore from other authors’ and thinkers’ research or perspectives.

Read. Engage. Enjoy!

WHAT DO YOU THINK?

Depending on how a gem is held, light refracts differently. At B+PC we engage in Pop Culture topics to see ideas from a new angle, to bring us to a deeper understanding. And like Pastor Shane Willard notes, we want “…Jesus to get bigger, the cross to get clearer, the Resurrection to be central…” Instead of approaching a topic from “I don’t want to be wrong,“ we strive for the alternative “I want to expand my perspective.” 

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