Is a readily-accessible social media presence feeding an obsession to be “in the know…in the now”?

How immediately do you expect or want to see someone’s photos when you know they are at a special event? Where do you look for more information about someone’s medical condition or update? How quickly are you to assume one person’s perspective is the only side of the story because it’s all you can see and read? What do you assume about a person’s life because of their posts? Are you willing to readily accept something as truth when it affirms what you want to hear or if it gets shared by one or more people in your feed? How much fact-checking do you do?

Social media helps us get fast access to information, whether it’s about an international or national event or an individual’s life. But has that instant access made us spoiled and lazy? Do we believe everything we read or see? Do we try to manipulate truth by controlling our access to information?

We need to ask ourselves these questions and commit to an authentic, humble search for truth instead of taking the fast track toward something that easily satisfy our need to claim as truth. Social media can be a great tool of communicating and sharing, staying connected and reaching out for help. But it can retrain us to think we need to know more than we need to know more quickly than we need to know it. Careful searching is worth the time and effort.