Final Blog

Technology, We Need To Break Up. Its You, Not Me.

As it took quite a while to put down my phone and focus on this writing piece, I identified my relationship with technology as slightly unhealthy. I received my pieces of technology, a cell phone, and a laptop when I was going into middle school to help me academically and socially. However, looking back on my middle school experience, technology is the root of many of my issues. I found it difficult to make friends at the bus stop on the first day since everyone around me was texting their friends, which I didn’t have yet. This is my first memory of technology acting as a barrier between me and my relationships with the people around me, emotionally and physically. 

When thinking about my relationships and the impact technology has had on them, my mind immediately goes positive. I think of the nightly Facetime calls I have with my best friend, who is in New York and I think of being able to hear my mother's voice while being ten hours away.

It is extremely easy to keep in touch and to keep up with my friends, no matter where we are. Communication is almost effortless. I can open an app and without any active action, I can see what my friends and acquaintances are doing. This low effort means communication has helped people keep in touch and tune with other’s lives, but has it helped deeper connections or just sustained them on the surface level? 

Due to the fast-paced, instant, and superficial ways of communication that social media brings, people find themselves having more connections, but less deep relationships.  I recognize this characteristic in myself, especially when comparing my experience with friendships with my parents' experience.

I find myself having more superficial connections with people due to social media and social media’s values. The rapid and immediate use of likes and posts takes away from the value of furthering a deep connection with others. Social media and other pieces of technology make it incredibly easy to sustain weak connections and it makes it more difficult to break past the barriers of the screen to unlock meaningful relationships. 

Besides the added difficulty in maintaining friendships, there has been a link between increased use of social media and mental health disorders. I've noticed a trend within my peers of an increased amount of depression and anxiety, especially in comparison to the mental health issues of our parents. 

I don’t think it’s a surprise to anyone that this generation has had extremely high levels of anxiety and depression, and the rates just seem to be getting higher. In addition to this, suicide rates have been extremely high for Generation Z. This could be due to an abundance of differences between Gen Z’s society, filled with economic despair and global pandemics, fun characteristics that Gen X’s society lacked. However, the largest contributing factor, in my opinion, is the curation and rise of social media which has been attributed to user’s lack of self-esteem. 

I’ve experienced this effect myself, by comparing my life, appearance, and goals with the curated life of social media influencers. I found my relationship with these influencers to get toxic and negatively impact my life. I would look at myself at my worst and compare it to their highlighted, filtered, life, especially during my middle school years when I truly didn’t grasp how monitored their social media was to show off the very best (and only the best). 

While social media has been extremely beneficial to my life, especially after moving away from home, it has been a negative influence for the majority of my life and my dependency on social media is not healthy.

I couldn’t even put my phone in the other room to finish this assignment.