How Is Social Media Really Changing Humanity?

How social media is rewriting the rules of being human and what it means to be human in the Digital Age.

Image by kalhh from Pixabay

This isn’t an article about screen time or social media addiction, cyberbullying, shortened attention spans and such. Something far more profound is happening beneath the surface of our scrolling, liking and sharing. What we are witnessing today is the emergence of an entirely new form of human consciousness. This isn’t about how social media changed what we do either, it’s about how it is changing who we are as humans.

Social media, in its current form, has only been around about 15 years, but the changes it has wrought on humanity are ones that would’ve taken multiple generations, perhaps over hundreds of years to happen before.

The generation that has grown up with smartphones and social media doesn’t just use technology differently, they think, feel and relate to the world in fundamentally altered ways from those who didn’t. Their sense of time, how they form and manage relationships (even their understanding of relationships), their sense of what it means to be authentic has quietly, profoundly, changed.

I’m writing this from the perspective of Western sociocultural thinking, but much of what I think has changed…