A note to my younger self
Boy has the world changed, I’m sure right now you are at the start of looking for your first job and thinking about how high school will turn out for you. Sorry to turn your hopes down but high school wasn’t exactly the best 4 years of your life. But even though you had a rough first 2 high school years, the months leading up to graduation were more enjoyable and will create many friendships and memories for you take after you part ways. But during these years in high school, you relied on a particular friend that befriended many other strangers but somehow knew you better than your real friends knew you.
Social media has been existent for some time and whether or not you admit to yourself, it will get you hooked on to it sometime in your near future. Your probably at the midst of learning how the transition from elementary school to high school is not at all what you expected, but don’t give up you will survive and get out alive. So back to that friend of yours, your phone was gladly given to you by your parents who thought that you needed a device in case of emergency or to keep in contact with. Who would have known that your parents were probably the initiators to this whole revolution that was about to happen. Sure you made those phone calls and sent those texts to your worried mother, but it opened doors to portals that opened your social life through the internet.
Social media will soon be your own way to open up, not necessarily in public, but surely in the online public realm. As you now know, Facebook was your very first social media account in elementary school and … wait hold up, Facebook was accessible to kids of all ages and its hard to believe that you would do anything — even lie about you age — to have access to Facebook. Social media is influencing so many audiences and although it is hard to believe at your age, it ruins many lives and creates many conflicts and problems such as Catfishing which you will learn later while browsing the TV listings. Back to the topic, you had your own profile with all your elementary classmates, even the ones you weren’t too fond of to be honest, until one day you were hacked and ‘someone’ deleted your profile. This ‘someone’ does not have a name, why? No one really knows who a person is based on their online profile, it is even harder to track people because the online world is very large, with many lies and tricks that unexpectedly hit you in the face. And although that ‘someone’ deleted your profile, it is technically not gone. Scary, right? Whenever you post something online, even on Snapchat — a really cool gadget that allows you to send 10 second pictures to someone and instantly delete themselves after, but you won’t explore this one until later on — that seems to be safe, is not safe at all because once its out online it will always be permanently there to stay, even though it is untraceable it is still somewhere. This is why I advise you to think twice to what you post, maybe not necessarily yourself but one of your high school classmates will need to hear you say this to them. And of course she is not going to listen to you because after all you were no one to tell her what to do, but if you don’t she will find out the hard way. Maybe after you tell her she will still refuse to listen to you, but just know that it kinda gets worse later.
Oh my, the changes that are about to be made as you grow older with your ‘friend’, because believe it or not it has to change and grow and survive in the internet. So don’t get used to the way social media is right now because it is going to change, and change, and still change. It is even going to expand to almost every place you visit because it is going to be ‘watching’ every step you take. Just think about it as George Orwell’s 1984’s Big Brother which you will read about in grade 10 and is going to be one of the books you will actually read all the way through surprisingly. The internet and all it’s social medias will somehow feel like they are controlling you or taking over society that was at some point ‘basic’ and like I refer to it as ‘pure’.
I’m sure you’re probably thinking that the inclination of social media and the internet, it is not all bad. You wont think about it as a negative impact on your life because it is going to be there for you as an aid or as a guide to help you survive high school. It is going to open opportunities to interact with friends and stay connected with family across the world. It is most importantly going to help you with school work and help you find friends in the future while transitioning to your university, making the transition a bit easier for you.
The meme, is going to be something that is probably out there right now for you but hasn’t been very popular, yet. It will soon be over popularized by the social society, and as much as you I want to deny it, you are going to be hooked on to it as every will be soon. Soon enough the use of memes will be used for almost everything and be seen by everyone. Fads and trends are also things that are impacting society at your time right now but you wont get to know their purpose until you get to this age. Fads are just like their name, they ‘fade’ away. They are popular topics that grab the whole world by surprise and gets them hooked on to it like it is heroin to a crack addict. But somehow these topics will run its course and be soon replaced by a new fad or trend.
Even the news and politics will soon be broadcasted and portrayed through social media and expand through the internet. It is hard to break it to you but Stephen Harper will not be prime minister forever and U.S president Barrack Obama will soon have to leave his position, and trust me you are not going to like who they new president will be. Just to sum it up, this new president will break the internet, and not in a good way. All of these things that are happening around the world will reach many internet users by the seconds and news will start to spread like wildfire and will create many hate and conflict in society and the whole world. But this is how we live now, it is almost hard to picture our lives with the internet and social media. It is going to surprise you how people will change because of how this addiction has taken over. Many occurrences that happen will most likely get posted onto social media where it is viewed by many users and spread by the millions. This is how we get our gossip now and it is somehow our ‘need’ that we feed on because you will be one of the scavengers that will feed on this addiction.
Just some advice: don’t shut down from your reality. The internet can be very vicious and poisonous, that will change your lifestyle. You are going to believe that you can multi-task but just face it, you would rather focus on one thing; the internet. Don’t let it blind you from what is happening around in, in reality. Don’t leave your OSAP application to the last minute because you are going to do that, this is something that could have been done earlier but you have pushed it and pushed it to the last minute because you have been distracted by social media and the internet. Some of the stuff that is going to be posted on social media is going to be so silly and pointless, especially the amount of fame that people with get from becoming ‘famous’ such as the cash me outside how bout dat girl — don’t ask — or topics that will completely disgust you like animal cruelty news on social media or the latest news on United Airlines overbooking unfair situation. Social Media is dominating you right now and that duck face you take a selfie of will soon be the talk about on social media and you wont even know you are doing half the stuff that will trending. You might not even describe yourself as someone who lives off social media, but just admit it to yourself earlier than later, this will help you to control how much time you need to spend on the internet and how much time you need to focus on your reality.
