After watching these videos and thinking a lot about my relationship with technology I have come to realize that it is very confusing. So much good has come out of technology but as we talked about in class every upside has its downsides. I think about everything that is made possible with technology. Technology allows me to communicate with my friends and family back home in New York while I start a new life here in North Carolina attending college and eventually moving here after I graduate. I can connect with friends and wish people a happy birthday that I may have never remembered if it weren’t for social media and technology. I can click an app on my phone and search for potential jobs, I can order dinner from my bed, and I can find any piece of information I could possibly need the answer to without moving a muscle. When I think about what I spend the most time doing with technology I automatically think of one thing- social media. On average I spend 4 hours a day on social media. That is 4 hours a day I could be catching up on sleep, working out, studying, or doing anything productive. Instead, I am sitting on my phone mindlessly scrolling through social media apps. Of course, there are benefits to social media, but for me, the results of social media are mostly negative. Between feeling like I should be doing more with my life or wishing I was living the life of someone else who I follow on social media, almost anything else I could be doing seems like a better use of my time. I know that most girls my age struggle with mental health as an effect of social media and the unrealistic and totally unattainable body image and lifestyle it promotes. I read an=n interesting article about why girls still use social media even though it seems like mental torture. I learned that people talk about themselves about 35% in real life. However, on social media, people talk about themselves around 80% of the time. When we receive a notification with positive feedback and someone engaging in our lives, we feel a positive feeling from dopamine. On social media, people talk about themselves 80% of the time. So when they receive a notification of positive feedback, they feel a positive sensation from dopamine. We are quite literally addicted to our phones. There are many studies that have proven mental health issues have gone up steadily because of new smartphones and social platforms being released. As more people use them, there are more people with greater health concerns.
Back to the positives- it is incredible how much the app Tok-Tok has taught me. From simple life hacks like how to make the best chocolate chip cookies in an air fryer, to relationship advice, to learning and teaching yourself how to know your self-worth, and why it is important to wake up in the morning and move your body and drink a lot of water. There are so many amazing things that have come from technology. Being able to see what your friend across the country is doing at any point in the day, being able to look up what 35% of $115 is within seconds, and being able to load your grades on your phone whenever you would like. Sometimes I think about how much I am on my phone. The screen time feature on my iPhone has been a game-changer in regard to realizing how much time and energy I am putting into my phone. I wonder if I am on my phone way more than other people and how unhealthy it is for my mental health, eyes, and even physical health. Instead of sitting on my phone for an hour in between classes I could be going for a walk or calling a family member I haven’t seen in months. I wonder how it affects my social skills and how much of a negative effect it has on my communication skills. People who are friends on social media and like and comment on each other’s photos will simply look down at the ground when passing that person on a sidewalk. It is so weird how our society and especially my generation is because of technology.
Technology is great for my relationship with friends and family. Having moved 12 hours away from New York with just my mom and dog, I have a much better relationship with everyone I left behind than I would if I didn’t have social media. I connect with family and friends every single day, I see when it is their birthday or when they just got a new job, and just about every other accomplishment that social media tells me about whir lives. For my mom technology is only a positive. She is old enough to not let social media affect her body image, and she is not naive enough to believe that everything she sees on social media is real. She always reminds me that people only post the highlights of their life on social media. You always see people happy and smiling, and you only see the best pictures of people on social media. This is what makes social media so toxic for young girls who do not keep this in mind when scrolling through social media each day. My mom is also always asking me “do you not know how to use google?” every time I ask her a question. Everything can be found on the internet these days, when thinking deeply about it it becomes mind-boggling. There is nothing you cannot find on the internet, which brings me to my next point. I always think about getting my first job and my boss searching my name on the internet and what may come up. Every time I search for my name it’s something new. From old Twitter posts that I made when I was 14, to random pictures of myself that even I have never seen before. This part of the internet is extremely scary. As I get older, I become more conscious about what I am putting out there for everyone to see, but back when I was younger, I did not care. The scary thing is that that stuff is out in the world forever. It may seem like you “deleted” something, but it will never really be gone. We talked in class about how when you download these social media apps you are practically signing your life away to these companies. You are agreeing to anything and everything they want by just clicking a little box that seems harmless because everyone has Instagram. No one is not going to download Instagram because of their terms and conditions, not my generation anyway. I am a much different person now than I was years ago when I was mindlessly posting whatever I want. As I go out into the real world, I worry about the effect social media can have on my future career. I have seen people’s lives ruined by others digging things up from the past, which was never a problem before social media.
The Tears for Fears video attached to this blog resonated with me. Sometimes I really do feel like that little cartoon character surrounded by a bunch of zombies with their eyes glued to their phones. And sometimes I feel like one of those zombies. We live in a world where you cannot go out to eat without each person taking photos of their food, and then likely having them sit on their phone the whole meal being completely un-present. Being surrounded by people trying to keep up with this fake persona of being perfect feels suffocating sometimes. It is hard to live life when it feels like everyone is just competing to see who can have the best life (or the best social media profile). While technology can be great and it is awesome to have every piece of information we could ever need at our fingertips, I think the world needs to take a step back. Everyone could benefit from putting their phones down and being present. “Reducing social media use to even 30 minutes a day results in significantly lower levels of anxiety, depression, loneliness, sleeping problems, and FOMO.” Calling people you care about instead of putting a heart on their picture, leaving your phone at home and fully engaging in conversation at dinner, and just learning to live without feeling the need to post every moment of your day every day. Below I attached an interesting video on the effects social media has on young girls on social media.
https://youtu.be/Ui0UNXsEGJ8
