where legends are made

Caden Harris – Social Obsession or Social Exception?

  • June 8th, 2021

As the virus known as COVID-19 raced from Wuhan, China to Italy and from Europe to Washington State, New York City, and across the globe, quarantined patients and social distancers moved their lives online. On Instagram, Tom Hanks and Idris Elba called attention to their diagnoses; neighbors in Tuscaloosa that are a part of the Calvary Baptist Church held an online sermon and continue to do so every Sunday. Once all universities transitioned to remote instruction, thousands of teachers moved their classes to Zoom and Google Hangouts. Suddenly, social media was relevant and necessary for our economy, at all ages, to survive.

Given concerns about staying in touch during lockdowns, the myth that “social media is ruining our younger generation” seems rather outdated. And yet, a growing chorus of researchers and scholars have been raising concerns about how screen time and sites like Twitter and Instagram impact young adults’ sense of empathy. For example, Sherry Turkle asserts that virtual feelings and simulated love do not equate to what real feelings and love are meant to feel like (Turkle). This notion has been adopted by many parents claiming that we are losing the ability to communicate due to increased screen time. At the same time, other writers such as Kenneth Goldsmith argue that this perspective ignores how much reading and information social media and technology gives us access to. Although social media has shown some negative effects when abused by causing significant decreases in healthy sleep patterns, self-esteem and academic performance, the role that social media is currently playing in the current coronavirus pandemic suggests staying connected with students, teachers, coworkers, family and friends are all much more possible than if it were to be ripped from our hands. It also is helping us retain information at a speed that was never done before. Being able to research something on Google compared to going to the library, which is hard to do during a quarantine, is much simpler and way more efficient in today’s fast-paced world.

Some major concerns that researchers and scientists have pointed out have stayed consistent through many surveys, experiments and observations. Dian Vries and a group of researchers from Utrecht University discuss body dissatisfaction and its correlation with social media use. Writing in Psychiatric Quarterly, Chris Ferguson studied the relationship between depression, self-esteem, and social media. Ferguson found that if young people engaged with social media more than two hours a day (the American Heart Association’s suggested maximum), they experienced higher levels of depression and lower self-esteem (Pg. 1). Similarly, journalist Jessica Brown reports on concerns about screen light, also known as room light, interfering with sleep patterns. Brown found in a research that more than half of young adults aged 19-32 medium or high levels of sleep disturbance with an average of 61 minutes of social media use per day (University of Pittsburgh). What the parental generation seems to not understand is even though the research showed sleep disturbance and social media use were involved in the same study, the University of Pittsburgh suggested that they couldn’t confirm whether social media was a direct cause of the disturbance in the study members’ sleep patterns (BBC).

Yet despite these clear drawbacks to overuse, family relationships between parents and adolescents can often mitigate the negatives of online engagement. A claim made by many research groups and studies that have been published was that family relationships, usually being parent to child, was a key deciding factor on if a user of the younger generation was going to have a positive or negative experience with their social media accounts and how they will interact with others. This correlates to the negative side effect of self-esteem and body dissatisfaction. American Psychologist Christopher Ferguson writes in the Psychiatric Quarterly that “Family involvement in children’s lives reduced their involvement in risky behaviors or other negative outcomes” (Pg. 6). Their research was trying to solve certain outcomes such as depression, delinquency, risky driving, risky sex, substance abuse and restrictive eating would be increased by screen time usage in the youth (12-19 years of age). By providing this information, Ferguson was able to express that while screen time, which is the amount of time using a device such as a computer, TV, or gaming console, can lead to negative effects in outcomes like depression, a positive relationship between the parents and the child can lead to way more productive factors in one’s environment.

A negative parent-to-child relationship showed to have some cynical effects on the younger generation and their use with social media. Dian Vries and other researchers from Utrecht University compiled a scholarly article in the Journal of Youth and Adolescence to discuss body dissatisfaction and how it can directly tie into social media. The authors expressed that “(p)arents not only convey messages about appearance ideals to their children, but the parent–adolescent relationship itself also plays a role in the development of adolescents’ body dissatisfaction” (Bearman et al. 2006). Instead of shaping your message as a parent to your child that social media is the root of all problems within our social media construct, they should instead express the ideals of your child’s body and how to not let that sway their mind. Vries went on to state that “when individuals feel secure in their relationships they are less likely to think that they have to conform to appearance ideals in order to gain others’ acceptance” (Vries 528). Having a closer bond with your child is proven to be a key asset in keeping their opinion secure within themselves and they will have a better chance of having a feeling of self-worth and not looking to get a certain amount of likes or comments on a picture that they posted.

Social media is a forever growing platform that has its successes and failures. We are communicating in ways that have never been done before, but a lot of people are saying that sites like twitter are causing extra levels of stress and mental health issues in today’s youth. Jessica Brown wrote on BBC that the Pew Research Center in Washington DC held a study to see if these social media sites were causing more stress in site users than they had before they opened the app. Their research showed that “Twitter was found to be a “significant contributor” because it increased their awareness of other people’s stress” (BBC). On the other hand, Brown went on to state that “Twitter also acted as a coping mechanism” and “the researchers concluded that social media use was linked to “modestly lower levels” of stress” (par. 6). Showing a balance in her source allows us to see that these social media platforms are being found to help others cope with the day to day life and how we manage our stress. When Brown points out that users seeing other people’s stress can cause our stress levels to increase can sound negative, but we as users are given the right on each platform to choose who and what we follow. You are not forced to follow a page in which complaining and negative energy is always being posted. Every platform provides a “unfollow” or “block” option for a page. Instead of blaming the platform for the underlying issue of stress and mood swings, we can look towards teaching users how to handle negativity on these sites and what steps they should take to use social media for good.

With social media playing a powerful role in our everyday lives, it has allowed the general public to produce gatherings for large social movements. According to Brian Peters, a writer for Buffer, there are 10 powerful movements that have shaped social media over the past 20 years. Some of these movements being silly and others being backed by a large gathering pushing for political change. For example, the Ellen selfie was a selfie taken at the Oscars which included a large group of actors and actresses. Ellen was the host and posted this on Twitter and suggested everyone retweet it so that they can break the record for most retweeted picture. To follow up on that, a kid named Carter Wilkerson tweeted “Yo @Wendys how many retweets for a year of free chicken nuggets” (Wilkerson). Wendys replied saying he needed 18 million retweets to fulfill his request and it gained a lot of traction. Wilkerson received 3.3 million retweets and Wendy’s decided to still give him free chicken nuggets. While these can be silly and almost meaningless, they give people from all over the world a chance to come together and take our mind off of stressful times. The other side of the spectrum to large social media movements can lead to large achievements and big social restructuring. For example, The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge was a charitable impact that social media never saw coming. In 2014, it started as posting a video of you pouring ice cold water on your head and challenging others to fulfill the challenge. This movement has now raised $115 million in research towards Lew Gehrig’s disease (Peters). Another movement that swept the nation was the #BlackLivesMatter movement. This began in large to respond to the police brutality news stories. The hashtag was used over 12 million times and “is the third most-used Twitter hashtag around a social cause (Peters). This movement got picked up more as NFL athlete Colin Kaepernick kneeled during the national anthem to stand against police brutality. President Donald Trump spoke back against this action but Kaepernick’s choice to kneel led to much more conversation and hope to resolve the problem in our judicial system.

The motivation behind this essay was the statement many parents always portrayed to their kids of “social media ruining my generation” and how that made me think on this topic more in depth and do some more research to see if this was something people actually thought. I went on to a parenting blog to see what parents are stating the risk factors are in their eyes. One parent asserted that “children would do better in school if they were not distracted by social networking sites (Whizsky). While this can be a valid point, a time like now where Coronavirus is causing students across the country to rely on social media and remote instruction to finish out their semester shows how valuable it is to our youth. Zoom has grown exponentially since the COVID-19 pandemic began. RBC Capital estimates that Zoom downloads have grown to 240,000 downloads per day since the month of March (Barrons). This number is almost three times the amount it was in recent months at around 85,000 per day. This demonstrates how much we as a society are having to lean on technology, social media and other online tools to continue our day to day lives as normal as possible.

When new inventions come up into public use, there is always a need for suspicions and worries. I am not here to say that there is no need to have caution while using technology and social media. The point of my argument is to unravel how the benefits of our progressing technological world should not be overlooked by the parental generation, but rather it should be embraced. With our world starting to transfer completely to online due to social distancing guidelines, it can be a good time for parents to collaborate with the younger generation on how to adjust to a fully online work life. My parents have taken the first step of asking me to give them a younger mind on their social media strategy, so now their mortgage company has a Tik Tok.

Life moves fast, right?

 

Brown, Jessica. “Is Social Media Bad for You? The Evidence and the Unknowns.” BBC Future, BBC, 5 Jan. 2018, www.bbc.com/future/article/20180104-is-social-media-bad-for-you-the-evidence-andthe-unknowns.

Ferguson, Christopher. “Everything in Moderation: Moderate Use of Screens Unassociated with Child Behavior Problems.” Psychiatric Quarterly, vol. 88, no. 4, Dec. 2017, pp. 797–805. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1007/s11126-016-9486-3.

Goldsmith, Kenneth. “Let’s Get Lost.” Rereading America, edited by Gary Colombo, Robert Cullen, Bonnie Lisle. Bedford/St. Martins, 2019, 270-285.

“Limit Screen Time among Kids, Experts Caution.” Www.heart.org, www.heart.org/en/news/2018/08/06/limit-screen-time-among-kids-experts-caution.

Peters, Brian. “Top 10 Powerful Moments That Shaped Social Media History Over the Last 20 Years #SMDay.” Resources, 5 July 2017, buffer.com/resources/social-media-history.

Rawat, Soman, and Soman Rawat. “WHAT PARENTS THINK ABOUT SOCIAL MEDIA.” Whizsky, 17 Mar. 2015, www.whizsky.com/2015/03/what-parents-think-about-social-media/.

Savitz, Eric J. “Zoom Video Downloads Spike, but Stock Valuation Remains Sky High.” Zoom Video Downloads Spike, but Stock Valuation Remains High – Barron’s, Barrons, 12 Mar. 2020, www.barrons.com/articles/zoom-video-downloads-spike-but-stock-valuation-remains-high51584026978.

Turkle, Sherry, and Sherry Turkle. “The Assault on Empathy.” Behavioral Scientist, 19 Sept. 2019, behavioralscientist.org/the-assault-on-empathy/.

Vries, Dian A., et al. “Social Media and Body Dissatisfaction: Investigating the Attenuating Role of Positive Parent-Adolescent Relationships.” Journal of Youth and Adolescence, no. 3, 2019, p. 527.

Wilkerson, Carter. “HELP ME PLEASE. A MAN NEEDS HIS NUGGS Pic.twitter.com/4SrfHmEMo3.” Twitter, Twitter, 6 Apr. 2017, twitter.com/carterjwm/status/849813577770778624.

Categories: Uncategorized

Caden Harris – Social Obsession or Social Exception?

  • June 8th, 2021

As the virus known as COVID-19 raced from Wuhan, China to Italy and from Europe to Washington State, New York City, and across the globe, quarantined patients and social distancers moved their lives online. On Instagram, Tom Hanks and Idris Elba called attention to their diagnoses; neighbors in Tuscaloosa that are a part of the Calvary Baptist Church held an online sermon and continue to do so every Sunday. Once all universities transitioned to remote instruction, thousands of teachers moved their classes to Zoom and Google Hangouts. Suddenly, social media was relevant and necessary for our economy, at all ages, to survive.

Given concerns about staying in touch during lockdowns, the myth that “social media is ruining our younger generation” seems rather outdated. And yet, a growing chorus of researchers and scholars have been raising concerns about how screen time and sites like Twitter and Instagram impact young adults’ sense of empathy. For example, Sherry Turkle asserts that virtual feelings and simulated love do not equate to what real feelings and love are meant to feel like (Turkle). This notion has been adopted by many parents claiming that we are losing the ability to communicate due to increased screen time. At the same time, other writers such as Kenneth Goldsmith argue that this perspective ignores how much reading and information social media and technology gives us access to. Although social media has shown some negative effects when abused by causing significant decreases in healthy sleep patterns, self-esteem and academic performance, the role that social media is currently playing in the current coronavirus pandemic suggests staying connected with students, teachers, coworkers, family and friends are all much more possible than if it were to be ripped from our hands. It also is helping us retain information at a speed that was never done before. Being able to research something on Google compared to going to the library, which is hard to do during a quarantine, is much simpler and way more efficient in today’s fast-paced world.

Some major concerns that researchers and scientists have pointed out have stayed consistent through many surveys, experiments and observations. Dian Vries and a group of researchers from Utrecht University discuss body dissatisfaction and its correlation with social media use. Writing in Psychiatric Quarterly, Chris Ferguson studied the relationship between depression, self-esteem, and social media. Ferguson found that if young people engaged with social media more than two hours a day (the American Heart Association’s suggested maximum), they experienced higher levels of depression and lower self-esteem (Pg. 1). Similarly, journalist Jessica Brown reports on concerns about screen light, also known as room light, interfering with sleep patterns. Brown found in a research that more than half of young adults aged 19-32 medium or high levels of sleep disturbance with an average of 61 minutes of social media use per day (University of Pittsburgh). What the parental generation seems to not understand is even though the research showed sleep disturbance and social media use were involved in the same study, the University of Pittsburgh suggested that they couldn’t confirm whether social media was a direct cause of the disturbance in the study members’ sleep patterns (BBC).

Yet despite these clear drawbacks to overuse, family relationships between parents and adolescents can often mitigate the negatives of online engagement. A claim made by many research groups and studies that have been published was that family relationships, usually being parent to child, was a key deciding factor on if a user of the younger generation was going to have a positive or negative experience with their social media accounts and how they will interact with others. This correlates to the negative side effect of self-esteem and body dissatisfaction. American Psychologist Christopher Ferguson writes in the Psychiatric Quarterly that “Family involvement in children’s lives reduced their involvement in risky behaviors or other negative outcomes” (Pg. 6). Their research was trying to solve certain outcomes such as depression, delinquency, risky driving, risky sex, substance abuse and restrictive eating would be increased by screen time usage in the youth (12-19 years of age). By providing this information, Ferguson was able to express that while screen time, which is the amount of time using a device such as a computer, TV, or gaming console, can lead to negative effects in outcomes like depression, a positive relationship between the parents and the child can lead to way more productive factors in one’s environment.

A negative parent-to-child relationship showed to have some cynical effects on the younger generation and their use with social media. Dian Vries and other researchers from Utrecht University compiled a scholarly article in the Journal of Youth and Adolescence to discuss body dissatisfaction and how it can directly tie into social media. The authors expressed that “(p)arents not only convey messages about appearance ideals to their children, but the parent–adolescent relationship itself also plays a role in the development of adolescents’ body dissatisfaction” (Bearman et al. 2006). Instead of shaping your message as a parent to your child that social media is the root of all problems within our social media construct, they should instead express the ideals of your child’s body and how to not let that sway their mind. Vries went on to state that “when individuals feel secure in their relationships they are less likely to think that they have to conform to appearance ideals in order to gain others’ acceptance” (Vries 528). Having a closer bond with your child is proven to be a key asset in keeping their opinion secure within themselves and they will have a better chance of having a feeling of self-worth and not looking to get a certain amount of likes or comments on a picture that they posted.

Social media is a forever growing platform that has its successes and failures. We are communicating in ways that have never been done before, but a lot of people are saying that sites like twitter are causing extra levels of stress and mental health issues in today’s youth. Jessica Brown wrote on BBC that the Pew Research Center in Washington DC held a study to see if these social media sites were causing more stress in site users than they had before they opened the app. Their research showed that “Twitter was found to be a “significant contributor” because it increased their awareness of other people’s stress” (BBC). On the other hand, Brown went on to state that “Twitter also acted as a coping mechanism” and “the researchers concluded that social media use was linked to “modestly lower levels” of stress” (par. 6). Showing a balance in her source allows us to see that these social media platforms are being found to help others cope with the day to day life and how we manage our stress. When Brown points out that users seeing other people’s stress can cause our stress levels to increase can sound negative, but we as users are given the right on each platform to choose who and what we follow. You are not forced to follow a page in which complaining and negative energy is always being posted. Every platform provides a “unfollow” or “block” option for a page. Instead of blaming the platform for the underlying issue of stress and mood swings, we can look towards teaching users how to handle negativity on these sites and what steps they should take to use social media for good.

With social media playing a powerful role in our everyday lives, it has allowed the general public to produce gatherings for large social movements. According to Brian Peters, a writer for Buffer, there are 10 powerful movements that have shaped social media over the past 20 years. Some of these movements being silly and others being backed by a large gathering pushing for political change. For example, the Ellen selfie was a selfie taken at the Oscars which included a large group of actors and actresses. Ellen was the host and posted this on Twitter and suggested everyone retweet it so that they can break the record for most retweeted picture. To follow up on that, a kid named Carter Wilkerson tweeted “Yo @Wendys how many retweets for a year of free chicken nuggets” (Wilkerson). Wendys replied saying he needed 18 million retweets to fulfill his request and it gained a lot of traction. Wilkerson received 3.3 million retweets and Wendy’s decided to still give him free chicken nuggets. While these can be silly and almost meaningless, they give people from all over the world a chance to come together and take our mind off of stressful times. The other side of the spectrum to large social media movements can lead to large achievements and big social restructuring. For example, The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge was a charitable impact that social media never saw coming. In 2014, it started as posting a video of you pouring ice cold water on your head and challenging others to fulfill the challenge. This movement has now raised $115 million in research towards Lew Gehrig’s disease (Peters). Another movement that swept the nation was the #BlackLivesMatter movement. This began in large to respond to the police brutality news stories. The hashtag was used over 12 million times and “is the third most-used Twitter hashtag around a social cause (Peters). This movement got picked up more as NFL athlete Colin Kaepernick kneeled during the national anthem to stand against police brutality. President Donald Trump spoke back against this action but Kaepernick’s choice to kneel led to much more conversation and hope to resolve the problem in our judicial system.

The motivation behind this essay was the statement many parents always portrayed to their kids of “social media ruining my generation” and how that made me think on this topic more in depth and do some more research to see if this was something people actually thought. I went on to a parenting blog to see what parents are stating the risk factors are in their eyes. One parent asserted that “children would do better in school if they were not distracted by social networking sites (Whizsky). While this can be a valid point, a time like now where Coronavirus is causing students across the country to rely on social media and remote instruction to finish out their semester shows how valuable it is to our youth. Zoom has grown exponentially since the COVID-19 pandemic began. RBC Capital estimates that Zoom downloads have grown to 240,000 downloads per day since the month of March (Barrons). This number is almost three times the amount it was in recent months at around 85,000 per day. This demonstrates how much we as a society are having to lean on technology, social media and other online tools to continue our day to day lives as normal as possible.

When new inventions come up into public use, there is always a need for suspicions and worries. I am not here to say that there is no need to have caution while using technology and social media. The point of my argument is to unravel how the benefits of our progressing technological world should not be overlooked by the parental generation, but rather it should be embraced. With our world starting to transfer completely to online due to social distancing guidelines, it can be a good time for parents to collaborate with the younger generation on how to adjust to a fully online work life. My parents have taken the first step of asking me to give them a younger mind on their social media strategy, so now their mortgage company has a Tik Tok.

Life moves fast, right?

 

Brown, Jessica. “Is Social Media Bad for You? The Evidence and the Unknowns.” BBC Future, BBC, 5 Jan. 2018, www.bbc.com/future/article/20180104-is-social-media-bad-for-you-the-evidence-andthe-unknowns.

Ferguson, Christopher. “Everything in Moderation: Moderate Use of Screens Unassociated with Child Behavior Problems.” Psychiatric Quarterly, vol. 88, no. 4, Dec. 2017, pp. 797–805. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1007/s11126-016-9486-3.

Goldsmith, Kenneth. “Let’s Get Lost.” Rereading America, edited by Gary Colombo, Robert Cullen, Bonnie Lisle. Bedford/St. Martins, 2019, 270-285.

“Limit Screen Time among Kids, Experts Caution.” Www.heart.org, www.heart.org/en/news/2018/08/06/limit-screen-time-among-kids-experts-caution.

Peters, Brian. “Top 10 Powerful Moments That Shaped Social Media History Over the Last 20 Years #SMDay.” Resources, 5 July 2017, buffer.com/resources/social-media-history.

Rawat, Soman, and Soman Rawat. “WHAT PARENTS THINK ABOUT SOCIAL MEDIA.” Whizsky, 17 Mar. 2015, www.whizsky.com/2015/03/what-parents-think-about-social-media/.

Savitz, Eric J. “Zoom Video Downloads Spike, but Stock Valuation Remains Sky High.” Zoom Video Downloads Spike, but Stock Valuation Remains High – Barron’s, Barrons, 12 Mar. 2020, www.barrons.com/articles/zoom-video-downloads-spike-but-stock-valuation-remains-high51584026978.

Turkle, Sherry, and Sherry Turkle. “The Assault on Empathy.” Behavioral Scientist, 19 Sept. 2019, behavioralscientist.org/the-assault-on-empathy/.

Vries, Dian A., et al. “Social Media and Body Dissatisfaction: Investigating the Attenuating Role of Positive Parent-Adolescent Relationships.” Journal of Youth and Adolescence, no. 3, 2019, p. 527.

Wilkerson, Carter. “HELP ME PLEASE. A MAN NEEDS HIS NUGGS Pic.twitter.com/4SrfHmEMo3.” Twitter, Twitter, 6 Apr. 2017, twitter.com/carterjwm/status/849813577770778624.