Published in
3 min readApr 19, 2018
- This past March I traveled to Antigua, a small island in the West Indies. Upon arriving to the island, from the plane window, all I could see was pastel colored houses and crystal-clear blue water. This was a very different sight from landing in say, Boston or New York City. As I was making my way to the hotel, I had about a 40-minute car ride through the city. As I was driving I was noticing how different a 19-year-old girls life is here than my own life. I drove by the school and I saw young students sitting outside enjoying lunch. In America, in some children are too afraid to go sit outside for lunch because of the fear of getting shot. I did not talk to any one of these kids but judging from their faces it did not seem that the fear of being shot was on their mind. One thing that wasn’t as noticeable as it would be in an American school during lunch time was cell phone use. A few students had phones but, each student was talking to one another laughing and seeming like they were having a good time. Granted, this island has a very different socio-economic culture than the United States but seeing their care free state of mind got me thinking about the way social media influences our lives.
- If you were to insert yourself as a fly on the wall in a high school lunch cafeteria, in Sudbury Massachusetts, on any given day, you would learn a lot about children of this generation. They would be on their phones, on Instagram, Snapchat and Facebook reading and posting updates or snapping pictures back and forth to their friends. There might not even be any face-to-face conversation happening at all. If you were to do the same thing, in the same high school but, the day after a school shooting the conversation and mood of the cafeteria would be drastically different. I know this because, I grew up and went to school in Sudbury (a place that has never been affected with gun violence). Because of social media, after a school shooting, no matter how far away it happens, everyone is bound to find out about it and all of its details. This can be a good thing, for safety reasons and a form of current events. But also, it can make the problem worse. Things on social media happen so fast and it is so easy to put something out there that is inaccurate. Using social media as the only form of news and entertainment can lead to false beliefs. Because it is so powerful, social media influences our lives greatly in a negative way.
- In the revised paragraph of Draft 1, I focused more on what my paper was about and got right to the point. When writing draft 1, I had a different idea of where my paper was going to go. When looking back at it, I realized that the story I told was unnecessary and my paper was no longer going in that direction. By staying on topic, the reader does not get distracted and will be able to understand and get into the paper easier.
