Social Media and Technology

 

This week I got to study the critical issue of social media and technology usage. These are both issues that seem to be growing. The image I chose to depict this issue is one that categorizes the effects of technology in different aspects of one's life. The survey asks emerging nations about the influence of technology on education, personal relationships, the economy, politics, and morality (Pew Research Center, 2022). The results are actually quite interesting as this topic of technology in education is quite controversial. Technology has certainly adapted as smart phones were created. Many apps were then created for various reasons, many being entertainment, but also many for educational purposes. In today’s blog, we are going to dive into the positives and negatives of social media and technology, and how this has affected classrooms.

Social media can be a wonderful place. It helps to keep people connected. People also use it to create content and make a living from creator funds. While it has many benefits, we must acknowledge the downside of it. Social media has grown to become very toxic. While watching the documentary Plugged In: The True Toxicity of Social Media Revealed, the negative effects of social media were greatly expressed. During it, the former senior executive at Facebook stated that “The short term dopamine driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how society works” (Willett, 2019) and this really stood out to me. TikTok is a social media video app. People can make videos of all kinds, most often are lip syncing and dancing videos. The app strategically structured it so that videos can be no longer than 3 minutes. They did this intentionally to weaken attention spans and keep people engaged and scrolling through the videos that appear in the ‘following’ or the ‘for you page.’ I can connect this to prior topics we have discussed such as mental health and bullying. Social media can cause ADHD, especially in the TikTok scenario, as its short videos affect long term focus. Mentally, people can also get depressed. For many, seeing someone on the internet causes one to compare themselves. Social media demonstrates how certain people live, and how they look, and it can lower people's self-esteem and cause depression. Later in the documentary, Ronan Parke told the story of him singing on television and the comments people would leave on his social media profiles. He stated that “People are always going to have opinions and they are not always going to be positive” (Willett, 2019) and this really made me upset at the impact social media has. People feel the need to attack strangers they do not know with little regard as to how that comment will affect the person on the receiving end. Cyberbullying is a serious issue as social media is global. Once something is posted on social media, it is added to one's digital footprint. One person may say something mean and people can take it the wrong way. It really impacts individual self-worth. Nobody knows what someone is going through, and a negative comment can be the last straw that causes someone to commit suicide from harrassment. The issue is that behind a screen it has become too easy to be mean and senseless.

Furthering my studies on this topic, I read a few articles which gave other ways in which social media was positive and negative. In one article it stated how social media “invites comparisons and anxiety” (Kamenetz, 2019). Snapchat and Instagram are big social media apps for posting photos or ‘selfies.’ The issue with this is that many times the images are edited or filters are applied which alter what the person actually looks like. Many young teenagers are at the age where they are impressionable and seeing these images of people they want to look like can severely mess with their heads. It can cause issues like lack of confidence and body dysmorphia. In a different article, it brought up the point that several educators “check for student understanding using cellphone applications like Kahoot” (Klein, 2019). Especially, during the pandemic, schools relied on technologies like this one to ensure students were keeping up and following along as the curriculums switched to be completed virtually. Lastly, technology in the classrooms can create an individualized learning plan for each student. In recent years, “educational software and applications have grown more ‘adaptive,’ relying on technology and algorithms to determine not only what a student knows, but what his or her learning process is, and even his or her emotional state” (Herold, 2016). The word adaptive stands out because just like we are an adaptive society, we need to adapt to learning with technology.

As a future educator, this is a tricky situation. Obviously, I would have to follow the guidelines that the school has set in place. Personally, I feel as if technology has more positives than negatives. From my own experience, I had teachers that would make the class put their cellphones in a numbered slot that hung over the door. I also had a teacher enact a software called GoGuardian on her end to my computer which censored me from accessing specific sites or opening new tabs. I do agree with the one article that educational tools can be found on the internet. I know I always loved walking into a class and hearing I would play Kahoot to review. Technology is extremely important, especially in a post-covid world. Look at this class for instance, it would not be the same if it were not virtual. I think if I were to decide to use technology in my classroom, I would use a software like GoGuardian which would give me the power to monitor each student's screen. I can also make sure they are staying on track and not accessing social media sites when they are supposed to be completing an assignment. Any student that was to feel inconvenienced by having this software watching their screen is typically the student who is doing something wrong and trying to hide their actions. I think encouraging them to take social media detoxes and teaching them netiquette is something that can really help keep social media more positive. I think from a learning standpoint, technology in the classroom is more good than bad.

References

Klein, A. (2019, September 6). Schools say no to cell phones. But is it a smart move? Education Week. Link

Links to an external site.

Kamenetz, A. (2019, August 27). NPR's The Scientific Debate over Teens, Screens, and Mental Health. National Public Radio. Link

Links to an external site.

Willett, R. (Director). (2019). Plugged-In: The Toxicity of Social Media Revealed. [YouTube Video]. Brick in the Wall Media.

Pew Research Center. (2022). Internet Has Most Positive Influence on Education, Least Positive on Morality. Retrieved from https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2015/03/19/internet-seen-as-positive-influence-on-education-but-negative-influence-on-morality-in-emerging-and-developing-nations/technology-report-23/.

Herold, B. (2016, February 5). Technology in education: An overview. Education Week. Retrieved November 20, 2022, from https://www.edweek.org/technology/technology-in-education-an-overview/2016/02