In the article, “Death of the private self: how fifteen years of Facebook changed the human condition,” the author John Harris writes about the negative impact social media has on people. Harris writes about how people lie and exaggerate about their lives on social media to present to others a better version of them. In the middle of the article, he incorporated statistics from a survey. He said that “Almost one in four admitted to lying or exaggerating about key aspects of their life online between one and three times a month.” This gives the readers the impression that social media has a bad impact on people because it leads people to lie about themselves, which means that people are living two lives.

I was ten years old when I first signed up for a social media account. I had signed up for Instagram because everyone in fifth grade had Instagram, and I definitely did not want to become an outcast. While I was in elementary school and middle school, I used to post about almost everything that I found interesting in my life because that’s what everyone did back then. However, ever since I entered high school, I stopped posting on social media because I realized that I didn’t want everyone to know about what is going on in my life. Currently, I don’t post anything on social media; however, I do use it to communicate with my friends and family. I got rid of all my posts and stopped posting because in the past when I used to post multiple times a day, I was always checking my phone for notifications to see who commented on my posts, liked my posts, and how many likes I have. Those of my friends who do post on social media do and don’t match up to who they actually are. This is because some friends would post pictures at their best, and some friends would post pictures at both their best and worst. I definitely do feel that my life has been heavily impacted by social media because ever since I’ve been using social media, the amount of time I spend interacting with people physically, drastically decreased.