away. In addition, I also have been in a long distance relationship for a year now, and I couldn’t imagine not having access to my phone and features such as facetime, text messages, snapchat, my camera roll, and so on. It allows me to not only communicate efficiently and effectively, but it has provided me a way to continue fostering my relationship with friends, family, and my significant other. Lastly, I also use the camera roll on my phone religiously. This allows me to reminisce on times when I was home, adventures me and my friends have gone on, as well as providing me a way to document my days and nights, that I then send to my relatives to keep them in the loop of my own life. The features and technology within smartphones has developed significantly and I am so fortunate to grow up in an era and environment where I have access to these innovations. However, with all things good, comes some bad, and this certainly applies to technology.
I think society is becoming a bit too attached and dependent on technology. We use it as a crutch in social settings and more, ultimately ruining a lot of our emotional and social skills. For instance, everyone knows about the weather app joke; when you’re in public and are feeling socially awkward you turn to scroll through your phone and when you can’t think of something to do on it, people will gravitate towards anything even the upcoming weather forecast. This joke honestly has such sad implications and an inside look into how technology has negatively affected society. Research over the past decades have shown more than enough downsides to technology, especially for childhood developments. These downsides involve social and emotional growth being stunted, a rise of obesity, sleep disorders, and mental health conditions like depression and anxiety – a far too common issue today.
Furthermore, technology such as social media has also impacted young generations in a very
negative way. I think a lot of kids lead very unhealthy lifestyles due to overconsumption of technology. They are given iPads and cell phones at very young ages which ultimately leads to endless access to apps, online sites, and an unfiltered version of the world. Eleven year old girls are scrolling through social media, seeing an almost unachievable beauty standard that they will spend the next 20 years trying to replicate and never quite feel like they reached it, no matter how many compliments they receive, how much weight they lose, or how many likes they get on their posts. There is a commercial by Dove, called the reverse selfie and it begins with a little girl editing and face-tuning a picture of a model who is her editor. It shows her getting ready in reverse, curling her hair, putting on makeup, editing away pimples, filling her lips, and practically changing her entire face. This commercial ends with the little girl who is around eleven or twelve, sitting in a dark gray room, clearly upset with herself, then the message “the pressure of social media is hurting our girls’ self-esteem, more screen time during the pandemic has made things worse” urging parents to have a talk with their kids now appears. This commercial is heartbreaking and sadly extremely true. If one were to ask any girl they know if they ever felt they needed to change something about themselves, they’d sadly respond with yes, and probably a laundry list of things they’d change. This same message was also shown in the Mad World Remix by Moby, when a girl moves in and out of the frame of her phone, resulting in her appearance changing from being dolled up in her clean and colorful room through the phone lens, to the reality of her being depressed, surrounded by a messy room, and clearly unhappy with herself. These are just two examples of this issue being recognized by society, but certainly are not the only ones. This has become a big social issue that for years people have tried to bring attention to, now leading to many brands having programs and projects, such as Dove’s Self-Esteem Project, trying to correct this issue. 
Overall, there are a lot of positives to technology however the unintended consequences to it infiltrating so many aspects of society and individual’s personal lives has been quite negative. I am not advocating that we should get rid of technology in our lives, but rather that there should be a reduction to how much we use it and for what purposes we do. I have begun utilizing the screen time feature, in Apple’s iPhone settings app. I currently only have a limit on TikTok, as I found myself getting sucked into the habit of endless and mindlessly scrolling for hours. Not only did I waste so much of my time on social media; but I began noticing a lot of different health impacts in my own life. I was significantly more tired throughout the day, more unproductive, I was getting poor sleep as I would fall asleep on it or wake up and immediately begin scrolling. However, most importantly I noticed how unhappy I was due to the amount of scrolling. I would sit in my room isolated from people, scrolling, and although when you scroll you feel as though you are a part of something, I realized that I was watching people through a screen doing things I wanted to be out doing and would have been.
No comments:
Post a Comment