Final Blog Post

In my opinion, I have mixed feelings in relation to technology. The amounts of pros and cons are unbelievable. Personally, I believe that my current relationship with technology, especially in this generation, is very unhealthy. This is due to numerous reasons, but the main underlying factor is my extreme addiction to my phone and social media platforms. I believe that I give technology way above the expected amount of time it should be getting. It takes up too much time of my day. I notice this when I get the notification from settings on my phone every night before bed when it states my screen time. I am shocked when it says I spend 8 hours on my device. If you think about it, there is 24 hours in a day. As a college student, about 8 of those hours are for sleep. That leaves around 16 active hours in your day, and HALF of those are spent strictly on my phone. This doesn’t even count for the endless hours on my laptop for school purposes. Recently, I’ve been extremely taken back by that, so I’ve done some deeper research to see what specific applications take up the most time. My top three used apps are IMessage, Tik Tok, and Snapchat. This is more than a causal way of relaxing; it is a destructive addiction.

On another note, the news I receive from technology platforms are a mix of “buzz feed” and facts. At times I believe the information I’m retaining is misleading, where other times it is reliable statistics from credible sources. The “news” from social media sites such as Tik Tok and Instagram aren’t always the full truth. A lot of it is just information to grab your attention, whether it is fully accurate or not.

At this point in society, it is sad to say that the use of technology is just an accepted aspect of the way we live. Directed at the teens in today’s generation, it is easy to say that almost everyone is influenced by social media, and not in a positive way. Social media has taken over our generation, and something needs to be done about it.

 

           

Overall, as stated in my blog, my relationship with technology is very 50/50. As grateful and as lucky as we are that we have such positive advancements with technology, the social media and phone aspect of it has affected us all in very negative ways. I am highly addicted to my phone, and as sad as it is, I believe I can speak for every other teen in our generation who just as unhealthily addicted. Something about this needs to change, but I personally believe we have gotten ourselves too deep.

 

Social media has put too many unrealistic standards on our society. The rates of depression, suicide, and anxiety are through the roof the past decade and only continue to rise.

 

After viewing the two short videos, as accurate as the Wonders of Technology was, the Dark Side video hit on a deeper level. Therefore, the truth does lie somewhere in between. The balance between these two are as simple as not only how much technology has advanced our society positively, but also all the negative outcomes from it, from a teenage standpoint. Unfortunately, I don’t think it is possible to “strike” a balance between the two, because our generation has dug ourselves too deep into the social media world. The only way to fix this would be eliminating social media as a whole, but that is very unlikely to happen due to a variety of reasons.