Social media has its ups and downs
As teenagers, technology has become a key part of our lives. Yes, technology has had a tremendous impact on healthcare, education and communication.
Teenagers benefit from advancements in all of these areas. It helps us do some things that make our lives easier, such as heat food quickly, warm our homes more efficiently, retrieve information and put together homework, such as essays and presentations. However, we tend to overlook these things and instead focus more on how technology advances our ability to communicate, share information and get feedback from other people’s opinions.
After all, we are teenagers!
Ultimately, I believe that one of the best parts of technology is its ability to unify people through social media.
Social media is the general term that includes websites and applications, allowing users to create and share content with the world. Some of these applications and websites include Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat. Facebook is a social networking website that allows users, like teenagers, to share videos and photos. We can send these to each other or to family members. It’s especially nice to share family pictures with relatives that live far away! It’s also nice to send messages to friends and family when the phone is not an option. Facebook can be used as a source of communicating positive emotions, such as encouragement and humor, and can put a smile on someone’s face! Also, for those who tend to be shy, Facebook can be used as an avenue of socializing.
Instagram is a social networking application where you can share videos and photos by linking them with hashtags of where you are and what you’re doing. It gives you a faster way of sending videos and pictures to other social media sources. In addition, these pictures and videos can also be filtered in a way to make bland images shine and come to life. If you have an artistic edge, you’ll really enjoy this application!
Finally, we have Snapchat, which is one of the most popular forms of social media. Snapchat is basically sending and sharing “self-destructing” photos and videos. To clarify, self-destructing images and videos essentially means, for instance, that you take a picture and designate a time in which you want others to be able to view it. Then once you share that picture, people can only view it once for the designated amount of time, which reaches its max of 10 seconds. This process of self-destructing photos and images make moments like these valuable and private, and doesn’t fill up your device with videos, which take up so much space.
I believe that social media is a great way to communicate with your friends, family and other people in the world. It is quick, efficient and fun. However, with every good use, there arise many possibilities for bad uses. Cyberbullying is one such negative use, where random people may comment on someone’s photos stating mean and hurtful things. They could even be scary and threatening. But the main reason why these people are cyberbullying is because of the lack of face-to-face resistance.
Social media has its ups and downs, along with most things that exist to advance and improve our lives. The key to enjoying social media is personal responsibility and reporting inappropriate communication. This way you can enjoy social media and be safe. In my opinion, these shared messages, photos and videos show us how amazing it is to communicate and share thoughts, or capture a moment gone forever and impossible to reproduce. Social media should be used to create a kind of unity that we could all gravitate toward.
Michael Kahn is a freshman at Rhinebeck High School. Contact him at firstname.lastname@example.org