Jay's Expose

As time goes on, the generations are getting shorter and shorter. The kids that are in middle school now seem like they’re living in a whole different world from those of us who were in their shoes less than a decade ago. A big factor in this is social media. When my peers and I were in middle school and at such an impressionable time in our lives, we didn’t have the constant influence of social media. Most of my friends, and myself included didn’t even have smart phones until we got to high school. Nowadays, kids get smart phones much sooner in life, and it’s usually justified in the name of safety. The issue is how the uber connectedness of everyone is affecting the mental health of people. It’s becoming harder to distinguish whether or not social media is helping or hindering people as a whole. With complete connectivity with the help of social media, there is never an opportunity to unplug or truly step away from knowing about everything going on all the time. This has created a whole new set of problems. When we fixed the problems of not being able to contact people, we created a new one. The ability to know what is going on with people you know, or don’t, fosters a culture of jealousy and the feelings that we’re potentially missing out. The prevalence of this feeling was so pertinent that a phrase was coined, “FOMO”, which stands for “Fear Of Missing Out.” The psychological effects of seeing the perfectly curated lives of everyone around you also leads to a sense of loneliness. This even extends into interactions we have with each other in person. As we become more and more dependant on our phones to provide us with something to do, at any horizon of discomfort or potential social awkwardness in any situation, people will pull out their phones. People end up being physically together in the same place, but worlds apart. In a Ted Talk by Sherry Turkle, she discussed the idea that we see loneliness as a problem to be solved. However, maybe the problem doesn’t lie in the times when we are alone, possibly rather in how being pseudo connected through social media leads to the feelings of loneliness.