FINAL POST

A World Overthrown By Devices

Impact of Devices

Every day is another day to walk by thousands of people completely consumed by their devices. Whether their face is directly in their phone or they are casually checking text messages on their fancy Apple Watch, or whether it is students in a classroom using a laptop or iPad at all times, the world revolves around devices. To ask a person to go a full day without a single technology would, to most people, be like asking someone to give up their identity for a day. People aren’t sure how to function normally without their cell phones. There has been a major increase in depression and suicide among young people because of the addiction of their cell phones and its created a scary world to live in.

There was a song written called "Don't Ever Let Your Children Grow Up"  by Maddie Pope and the verse of this song that truly captures the most terrifying parts of the world reads: 

..."When you walked up to school and everyone there was your best friend

When you learned your numbers and shapes and played pretend

You didn't mind that your hair was a mess, you were so carefree

You didn't know how cold and cruel this world would one day be

We were just so young

We should have known

We should have known

That one day we'd hate our bodies and we'd orbit around buttons on a phone

We should have known

That one day we'd pluck our eyebrow hairs and wonder why the cool kids stared at me

Oh why'd it have to be

Our imaginations have run dry

We hate ourselves and have a nightly cry

And then we act like we're fine

It's alcohol and bombs and drugs, don't ever let your children grow up”

The song continues on after this verse, but highlighted are the parts that directly apply to what technology has done to our society as a whole. Though there are parts of this song that may not seem to link directly to “buttons on a phone”, every single part does. Teenagers’ lives at school are all centered around “the latest posts” or “whose with who this weekend”. It’s an endless web of heartbreak on the internet and this song depicts that absolutely perfectly. 

Healthy or Unhealthy Time Commitment?

Cell phones are not all bad, I will repeat, cell phones are not ALL bad. Having said that, when it comes to the “healthiness” of the time spent on cell phones, it is shocking and a bit disgusting how much time is spent on devices every single day. Looking at many different studies, the average screen time teenagers today have spent each day doubled to 8 hours during the pandemic, and alarmingly stayed this way even after the pandemic. On a personal note, there were times that my screen time told me I averaged 12-15 hours a day on my phone. That is the majority of every day spent on my screen instead of living my life. THAT IS CRAZY!

The world has changed to completely remote in these past couple of years. For adults, they are constantly having to add technology into their workplaces and needing to be on practically every social media platform just to be successful in their careers. For young adults, their generation was part of the group that made technology so common in the social media realm in the first place, but had some time in their lives before the media spike where they could have fun without it. For teenagers… their whole lives are consumed by their cell phones. Some will go hours on end sitting next to a friend without saying a single word, forgetting there is another person in the room. That is just a norm for them, a norm that older generations look at and are instantly concerned. They have also perfected how to edit a photo to be a completely different version of themselves without a single person being able to tell that there were changes made. Today, it’s hard to tell whether someone is 13 years old or 18 years old on social media or even in person because that age group feels the need to grow up so quickly due to the influencers they are watching daily. They feel obligated to wear the smallest, showiest clothing they can find and learned before middle school how to do the perfect face of makeup any time they leave the house. The teen generation is this way, though, because those older than them did not reassure them that it is better to live the “embarrassing” childhood times. The days where kids would make Dubsmashes (short video clips to do “dumb” things) and share them with everybody because they were funny and entertaining, not because they looked good and needed to prove themselves to the world. Dubsmash has been replaced by TikTok, where the goal is to get the most views for looking a certain way as opposed to laughs and fun of other video-based apps.

Conclusion

Social media truly has had a positive impact on the world in millions of ways, but social media has also changed the world in scary ways as well. There are millions of songs written about the difference in the world and how much harder it is to live today than it used to be. Another music example would be the song "Breaking Up Was Easy in the 90's" by Sam Hunt. The premise of the song is that social media throws the person who broke his heart in his face every single day. He talks about how before social media he could live his life and move on in a healthy way, whereas with social media being everywhere he goes he cannot move on with his life the way he wished he could. This is another major problem with cell phones and why there is such a high depression rate nowadays. Breakups are one of the hardest things a person can go through, and with the advancement of technology there is no way to cope without getting hurt even worse by the cell phone.  

This also ties into the false realities that social media puts out there. Not only does this happen in relation to breakups, but it connects to the song in the sense that people only put their best foot forward online. Every day it takes one scroll of Instagram or one passing through Snapchat to see hundreds of people posting the biggest smile they can put on, making everyone think they are living their best lives when the reality is most of those people are not. Some of those people are posting a smile just to deflect people from knowing how they are actually doing, that is horrifying. This was also seen in the Mad World Remix video where the whole world of people was so consumed in commenting happy emojis on people's photos and posting their own smiling pictures, when the reality was they were frowning, crying, and hurt behind the screen.

Social media, cell phones, and technology are an incredible invention. There is no denying that without the advancements made there would be many things in the world that just weren’t done as well. Having said that, society needs to do a check in and see that they are beginning to use it wrong and it is time to make social media the fun, positive connection that it used to be.