in some type of fantasy in the safety of their home . The issue is when they get an audience to validate their dreams .
The social media provides a convenient and anonymous audience and you only get to know how popular your exploits are by the number of people following you and liking your posts and this has become the new addiction superimposed on the daydreams .
This has led to the creation of a phenomenon known in social media as clout chasing . In popular culture a person with clout is one that is seen as influential and cool and is a trendsetter who typically has a massive following and many try to copy what they do .
It did not take long before marketers noticed this social trend and the huge following means reach and this gave birth to the new marketer known as an influencer and is paid to subtly sell brands by associating them to luxury living .
From the moment that clout was monetized , clout chasing became a serious business and since the only way to build followership is to indulge in more outrageous behavior and exploits , the whole social media slowly morphed out of reality . Influencers live in a never-ending dream .
The problem is that with conventional media one was able to properly target their audience and content was controlled by law and self-regulatory bodies but the social media is a free for all virgin ground and anything and everything goes .
The end result is that what seemed like an innocuous platform , the social media is proving to be an ogre in disguise ; we have seriously underestimated the social and personal impact of this platform and seen it largely as an innocent pastime .
Psychiatrists and medical practitioners in the West are growing progressively alarmed by the number of plastic surgery requests they are getting from teenage girls who wish to have their looks modified to conform to the ones they have digitally created .
Teenage girls are dissatisfied with how they look and they wish to alter their physique in line with what social media has determined to be cool and to avoid body shaming which they dread . They have trapped themselves into an imaginary world and are now afraid to face reality . There has been a spike in the level of teenage suicides attributed to girls who feel
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The failure of the government to regulate the social media should not be an excuse for marketers to cast aside their moral obligation to society and deliberately make a bad situation worse . Businesses are now partners in eroding the moral fabric of society .
they don ’ t fit in the cool world and who are unable to find the amount of money they need to carry out the type of body enhancements that they feel they urgently need . And just in case you think this is a girl problem , remember that a boy ’ s idea of beauty standard is also what he sees on the social media . He is unable to find in real life the type of look that he sees on social media every day and he is depressed that all he sees around him is ‘ ugliness ’.
Adolescents are in a catch twenty-two , the girls are digitally altering themselves to be attractive and inadvertently they are chasing away the same boys they are trying to attract because they don ’ t look like their profile photos in real life .
We have used the teenage girl as a focal point where the problem is manifesting itself the most but the whole social media debacle is affecting all single ladies on the lookout for stable relationships . The social media has distorted the classic ‘ boy meets girl ’ process .
But it is the business exploitation of this problem that we should be concerned with as marketers . Marketers have adopted the influencer concept without due care to the moral and ethical boundaries it crosses . Marketers are legitimizing an unethical behavior .
To knowingly pay someone to portray an outrageously false lifestyle as an influencer so long as they are promoting your brand is to abet misleading advertising . The use of social media destroys the concept of targeted message and presently a five-year old has access to the same messages as a fifty-year old .
The failure of the government to regulate the social media should not be an excuse for marketers to cast aside their moral obligation to society and deliberately make a bad situation worse . Businesses are now partners in eroding the moral fabric of society .
Ochieng was so engrossed in the topic that when he eventually looked around to where his mystery lady was sitting , he was dismayed to realize that they had left when he was still deep into the conversation . He felt a tinge of regret for not having gotten her contacts .
It was time for them to also return to office but Ochieng had this nagging feeling that he had not heard the last word on the topic they were having . Since he had her name and had seen her , it occurred to him he just needs to go into social media and he would find her . Was social media a curse or a blessing ?
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