Has Spencer got a new haircut? Who’s Harry Styles going out with? Did you see the tweet about Justin Bieber’s auntie’s postman?…Who cares?
Students seem more consumed by social media and celebrity culture than ever before. This is not surprising in a world where Jordan adorns the front cover of every magazine and Piers Morgan is hailed as some sort of chat show demi-god. Consequently, a new fad of social bragging has taken hold – everyone wants to show their friends that they are having the best, most exciting time.
Many of my friends will do something with the sole purpose of posting a picture of it to Instagram after. Students seem desperate to perform some act that is deemed ‘tweet-worthy’. Sadly the obsession with social bragging has taken the place of both real life conversation and activities in which one is required to concentrate for more than 5 minutes – recently my housemates and I tried to watch a film but by halfway all eight of us were mind-numbingly scrolling through the twitter feed to see what Taylor Swift had been up to on a Sunday evening.
This consumption by social media and celebrity culture has also bred a new self-involved vanity – we all know someone in a permanent pout who treats their ‘mobile uploads’ with the same reverence previous generations reserved for wedding photos. Thousands of students are trapped in their own world, constantly stroking their cheekbones and photographing their own faces until they’re disturbingly intimate with them.
The silver lining to this depressing cultural bog comes in the form of the fantastic box set series’ that have graced our screens in recent years. Students are watching episode after episode of the Sopranos or the Wire. However, I fear that even these viewing experiences can be marred by this emerging idea of doing something just so you can tell someone else you’ve done it, or brag about it on a social networking site – if I had a penny for the amount of people who have implored me to watch Breaking Bad and Homeland in the last few weeks…
When talking to my parents about my time at University they seem genuinely upset that my friends and I don’t stage sit-ins in the library to protest against atrocities going on in some far-off corner of the world. I find it difficult to make them understand that we do live in a country where the sidebar of the Mail Online has become a fundamental cultural staple and where the Made In Chelsea cast are held in the same regard as the Pope.