The Sickness of a Connected World

Eloise Cecilia Shaw
Sep 2, 2018 · 4 min read

Being able to interact with friends and ‘stay in the loop’ from the comfort of your bed is a great benefit of living in the digital age. However, it’s not so great when you come to realize that everyone is hanging out without you.

PC: Dreamstime.com

I can just about remember the days before having a smartphone became the most important thing in my life as a 6th grader. I got my first phone right before I started middle school. I knew exactly what kind I wanted seeing as a few of my older friends already had it: a pink Nokia 7373. This phone was my greatest treasure. It was a symbol of my rise to adolescence. The simple twist brick didn’t last long though. It was only a year later when I began craving something more. Between 7th and 10th grade the worst possible thing that could ever happen to me, was having my Blackberry smartphone taken away. The Blackberry was all the hype back then as it was the only phone with BBM; instant messenger for Blackberry, much like the iPhone’s iMessage. Yet soon enough, the iPhone became increasingly popular, and by half way through 10th grade, I ditched both my iPod touch and Blackberry for the newest Apple invention: the iPhone 5.

Throughout high school, Instagram and Snapchat were two of the most important things for keeping up my reputation. As time went on, these apps developed, and the way my peers and I used social media, evolved. Instead of reposting cool pictures of stuff that we found online, we started using these platforms to broadcast our every move, whether it was posting selfies with each other, or sharing a map that recorded our last run. I became part of my first ever group chat during my Junior year of high school. I had recently made friends with the ‘cool girls’ and I remember feeling as though I had been invited into their world of secrets and coolness when I received that first notification: “You’ve been added to a group: Best Babes” followed by a heart emoji. Although I was high off the feeling for the first month or so after being added to the group, I soon started to relate to a lot of what Jean Twenge mentions in her 2017 article, “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?” I loved being able to wake up in the morning and talk to my friends before even getting out of bed, but that would end minutes later when a recent post would show up on my Instagram feed of my ‘friends’ having a sleepover the night before, without me.

The first thing that comes to mind when I think about my experience with technology and social media, is that feeling of being left out. I suffer from FOMO (fear of missing out), and that, along with my active use of social media, allows for me to very easily feel as though I’m not doing enough with my life. Just as Twenge states, the younger generations who are growing up with technology are currently facing the “worst mental-health crisis in decades,” which comes as no surprise. It is so easy to feel as though you’re not good enough when you are able to watch everyone else having fun from an app, while you sit at home. Most of the time it can feel like a popularity test. Who gets tagged the most in pictures? Or who gets the most compliments on their post? Our entire social reputations are measured in likes. During my Senior year of high school, one of my friends started telling the boys in our class about the secrets we shared in our group chat. This was by far the biggest betrayal of trust and friendship, and resulted in her being kicked out of the group chat. It’s funny to think how our relationships are dictated by how we act online, and the thought that being let in or kicked out of a group chat is how we establish our social popularity, is absurd, yet entirely accurate.

In Twenge’s article, she provides a lot of information regarding the way teens use social media in the modern day, and how it affects their behaviors. The statistics that she mentions, are an interesting contrast to some of the things discussed in the movie “Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World” (2016). The use of technology when it was first invented is shockingly different from the way it is used today, as well as how it is being advanced to use in the future. It is eye opening to really think about how before all of this modern day technology, human interaction was much more in depth and focused, seeing as you couldn’t just text anyone, at any time. Compared to today, where people are neglecting their body’s physical needs due to a social media addiction.

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