Month: May 2019

Rita Sharon

Eng 2150

Professor Seth Graves

Research Essay

Social Media, A BlessingBut A CurseIn Disguise.

It is the last semester of my high school year and I am sitting on my phone, not paying attention to my teacher and scrolling through Instagram. I see these beautiful girls, skinny with a whole lot of money and I look down at myself. I do not see this beautiful girl anymore, I just see an average girl and I start to think about all the past times when someone made fun of me, when someone rejected me, when I just was not good enough. Clinton R. Sanders, and D. Angus Vail say that, “People use appearance to place each other into categories, which aid in the anticipation and interpretation of behavior, and to make decisions about how best to coordinate social activities.” (Sander & Vail 1) Every once in a while, someone feels this way to and unfortunately many feel this way today. The constant need to look at our phones and our social media platforms has created this type of mental divide in our lives. People value social life and never remember that these social media people are putting on an act.  You see these people and think to yourself, why can I not look like this or why can I not have this much money. Many live a life where social media has taken over their life and is affecting their mental health in a negative way. Many suffer from anxiety because of this and many suffer from depression.

When social media was just starting people were not as addicted and many did not even own a single social account until years later. According to Statistas, “Percentage of U.S. population with a social media profile from 2008 to 2019,” only ten percent of the world had a social media profile in 2008 and now in 2019 seventy nine percent of the world has a social media profile. Now after many years and many new updates many solely rely on social media as a way to communicate, and show the world who they are. From posting pictures and tweets, to just scrolling and looking at what other people are posting we don’t understand how much it is affecting our brains and daily lives. Jill Savage Scharff conducted a research study to find out how people are reacting to being treated for mental health problems over the phone or online on their laptops. Being a doctor himself he gathered intel from his clients and with the help of other psychotherapists and psychoanalyststo find out the truth behind the question. As they all conducted research he would also ask his current patients how they would feel about online treatment. He writes that, “Some patients comment that this is the only place in their lives where they allow themselves to be free of technology, speaking to its nearly constant presence in their lives.” (Savege Scharff 3) Some believe that online treatment might be helpful in the future because the online world is quickly expanding, but some see it as a way to fully disconnect from face to face conversations and never be free of the technology they use. Even though these people could benefit from doing therapy online, they will still be home well in reach of their social medias and other social platforms that have drove them here. They come to his office and turn off their phones, in hope to have some peace and quiet from the social life. With a constant need to check social platforms, many want to have a time where they can just forget about it all and just talk to a person who is right in front of them. Many suffer from mental health problems and when they come to a point where they realize they need help they mostly want to talk to someone but are worried of leaving their homes or seeing people. According to the National Institute of Mental Health roughly nineteen percent of adults suffered from mental health problems and roughly fifty percent of adolescents from the ages of thirteen to eighteen suffered from mental health issues in 2017. Out of these people who reported having issues only half went to get treatment. Gillian Fergie, Kate Hunt, and Shona Hilton studied these methods and had asked many people of what they thought about online therapy. They stated in their article that, “Many participants, including a number of ‘prosumers’, expressed concerns about being perceived as “the girl/boy who has diabetes/mental health issues” or as someone who was always “moaning on” about their illness.” (Fergie, et al) Many are worried that if they do online therapy or group therapy people will see them as attention seekers, people who just want to constantly complain about their lives because they have nothing better to do. So, many just stay at home on their phones doing nothing about their problems and continue to look at social platforms.

People spend a great deal of time on their phones, hours a day, reading posts about everything that is going on in the world today.According to Quentin Fottrells article, People Spend Most of Their Waking Hours Staring at Screens, “American adults spend more than 11 hours per day watching, reading, listening to or simply interacting with media…That’s up from nine hours, thirty-two minutes just four years ago.” From 2014 to 2018 the hours spent on social media platforms went up by three hours and not only did it affect peoples every day lives but it affected their relationship with families and friend. In an article by Andrea Petersen in the wall street journal she says that, “It is unclear why the rates of mental-health problems seem to be increasing among college students. Therapists point to everything from the economy and rising cost of tuition to the impact of social media and a so-called helicopter-parenting style that doesn’t allow adolescents to experience failure.” She talks about these problems and how they all correlate with one another. Because college students in this society are always talking over social media they are talking about everything. A constant conversation about what is going on in the college, what the college costs, and how everyone’s opinions are different from everyone else’s. They see this as a great way of talking but don’t understand that it brings stress to their life. These so-called helicopter parents that she talks about have raised many students to believe everything they do is right, that their life is perfect and what they think is the correct and is the most important thing. When it comes down to moving into the dorms, paying thousands of dollars for tuition, or communicating with people they have class with, the students start to realize their parents were not always correct. They see these kids on social media that are complete opposites, either it be different cultures or different ways of dressing, or even different thoughts on the economic standing of the country. The student does not adjust easily to such a new environment where they are alone. They stress themselves out that they don’t fit in, that they look different, think different, dress different, post different, and it creates a mental health disconnect. Holly Shakya and Nicholas Christakis, state in their article, A New More Rigorous Study Confirms: The More You Use Facebook The Worse You Feel, “Self-comparison can be a strong influence on human behavior, and because people tend to display the most positive aspects of their lives on social media, it is possible for an individual to believe that their own life compares negatively to what they see presented by others.” People begin to subconsciously assume that those pictures convey a representation of their friends’ life, since this is all they see on their feed. In reality, however, people tend to post only the best parts of their lives, often recycling pictures and reposting the same vacations over and over again, in pursuit of more likes and attention. People hold very high standards to what needs to be posted on social platforms and when they start to compare their posts to other posts it doesn’t match up.

You can also see that many college students suffer from depression. Andrea Petersen also states that, “Nationwide, seventeen percent of college students were diagnosed with or treated for anxiety problems during the past year, and fourteen percent were diagnosed with or treated for depression, according to a spring 2016 survey of 95,761 students by the American College Health Association.” Roughly thirty percent of students have some sort of mental health problem and one of the biggest factors is the constant need and use of social platforms that have been instilled in our brains. Students rely on these social platforms to sit in their beds and have conversations instead of getting dressed and sitting with a group of friends. Students can’t focus on anything for a long time because they are glued to their phones, to the constant need to check their phones. The constant worry that they will miss something so mundane as a salad posted by a famous celebrity. They worry more about social media and their attention to social media that they forget they are in college to learn and get a career. Hou Yubo and others in their article about social media addiction conducted a study to prove this point and to show how social media is really affecting or minds. In their research they had two different studies one where social media was limited and one were social media was in full use. They found that, “Study 1 showed that a self-rank measure of academic performance was negatively associated with social media addiction. This relation was not mediated by self-esteem. Study 2 further showed that an intervention to reduce social media addiction improved learning engagement and increased the time spent on learning outside the class.”  These two different studies show and prove that because people are so addicted to social media they are putting everything else they do at risk of failure. People who were constantly using social media and could not put their phones away were struggling in school work. They couldn’t not focus on studies outside of the classroom because they had no control there. The people who were part of the intervention and were using social media less were more engaged, they were learning more, and reacting to the information around them even when they really didn’t need to.  According to Stoney Brooks’, Does personal social media usage affect efficiency and well-being?, “In the university classroom, Jacobsen and Forste found a negative relationship between usage of various types of electronic media, including social networking, and first- semester grades. Heavy Facebook use has been seen in students with a lower grade point average (GPA).”  Many students sit in lecture halls and spend most of the time on Facebook not paying attention because the professor can’t see them. In the end these kids fail their classes, which correlates with stress and anxiety, which has correlations with mental health problems.

We can also see a more recent example with the social platform Instagram. Not too long ago they had encountered a technical issue and for a full day the app was not working. People couldn’t bare to spend a full day without this social platform. They sent in emails, posted snapchats and tweets, just bashing Instagram freaking out that they could not post anything or refresh their feeds. People were going crazy they couldn’t be up to date and they felt like they had nothing else to. People are so addicted to seeing posts and being part of the trend that over twenty-seven million people liked a picture of an egg just to beat Kylie Jenner’s most liked picture. And yet the creator of this World Record Egg launched a social media campaign encouraging those who struggle with social-media pressures to seek help. Another example is when the famous rapper XXXTentacion was shot in Miami. A nurse had reported that if people were not busy with taking videos to post on their social medias the rapper could have survived if someone went to help him out or even called the police. It also doesn’t just affect teenagers, but the older generations. We see professors today who are in their thirties or forties and cannot focus on something for more than five minutes. We see professors who rather talk about some social post instead of actually teaching, or professors who talk about a messed-up slide for two hours. This all also affects how we are reacting to social media. Many rather sit on their phones and go through the same one hundred posts than listen to a professor talk about a slide that isn’t working all because the professor five minutes ago was doing the exact same thing.

Every day millions of people wake up and look at their phones. They wake up to a bunch of texts from there so-called social media friends. They wake up to a bunch of notifications from Instagram and twitter and snapchat. They rather lay in bed and go through all of this and see everything that they missed in the few hours that they slept then getting up and starting their days. We can even see an example with Jen Selter, an Instagram celebrity and an American fitness model idolized by nearly thirteen million followers. She had publicly stated that she needed to take a break from the “platform of perfection” and instead focus on her mental health. Even a twenty-four-year-old model, that is considered to be perfect in her followers eyes is struggling with the pressures of social media further proves that the image of a perfect life that is constantly shown on social media platforms is simply a disguise. It shows that everyone can suffer from negative effects on mental health associated with the culture of social media.

Even though many people leave their phones, or turn off their notifications, or take a break from social media, they still have that constant feeling of not having enough information about what is going in the society, or not keeping up with the social trends. These platforms are embedded into our brains, we get updates about school closing on twitter, how people are striking against some cause, or what happened five blocks away on an app controlled by us. Many live for the moment to open their phone and see something new, to see what was just released by Supreme or Louis Vuitton, to see what some rich celebrity is doing on their thirteenth vacation this year. Many are addicted to this, and can’t live without this. Many can’t focus in class, and believe that they are not worth enough because someone else is, many see themselves as being poor or ugly or fat because other people aren’t, many rather stay at home and be to themselves behind a screen instead of seeing their friends because they don’t know how to fit in anymore.

Social platforms have taken over society today. Everything is electronic, everything is being shared and posted. Everybody knows what is going on in a different part of the country. But people don’t know how their best friend of ten years is doing or feeling. People dont know how to not write without shorting words. People are going online to solve problems and sometimes it really helps us, but sometimes it just makes everything worse. Between self-diagnosis, or a diet that might hurt us in the long run. Many are living in a world of technology but are not using it in our benefit. People have witnessed how social media has changed lives. From being able to have business meetings no matter where you are in this world, or to having connections with people thousands of miles away, or being able to discuss issues with privacy, or being able to follow the news around the world. People have seen how social platforms have motivated people and grown businesses and even allowed for online education and learning tools for anything you can possibly think of. At the end of the day many rather sit in a class room and watch a YouTube video or scroll on Facebook than pay attention. Many can’t focus on doing homework or studying for an exam without checking their social media accounts. Many will compare themselves to others and believe that they are not worth anything. Many are looking at posts that make them upset, that make them insecure, and lose their attention spans. Many are addicted to something so fake and just crazy to follow. Many feel fake vibrations in their pockets when there isn’t one. Many are addicted to something that was created to make our lives easier and more entertaining, a way to make talking to someone one hundred times easier. But instead it made life for some awful. No matter what it is very hard to argue the fact the social platforms have made life much more productive and much simpler, and as social media grows it will benefit us even more. But it also has its vast amounts of negatives which cannot be overseen. Studies and statistic have proven that social media is taking a toll on our lives but they have also proven that with moderation we can still use all of our accounts but be more productive, have better attention spans, and have less issues with mental health. To every person their own and some may even say that social media has helped them, but it is clear that for many the correlation between social media usage and mental health issues is a vast issue and needs to fixed.

 

 

Bibliography

 

Clinton R. Sanders, and D. Angus Vail. Customizing the Body: The Art and Culture of Tattooing. Temple University Press, 2009. Online

Christakis, Holly B. ShakyaNicholas A. “A New, More Rigorous Study Confirms: The More You Use Facebook, the Worse You Feel.” Harvard Business Review, 21 Aug. 2017, hbr.org/ 2017/04/a-new-more-rigorous-study-confirms-the-more-you-use-facebook-the-worse- you-feel.

Brooks, Stoney. “Does Personal Social Media Usage Affect Efficiency and Well-Being?” Computers in Human Behavior, vol. 46, 2015, p. 26.

 

Fergie, et al. “Social Media as a Space for Support: Young Adults’ Perspectives on Producing and Consuming User-Generated Content about Diabetes and Mental Health.” Social Science & Medicine, vol. 170, 2016, pp. 46–54.

 

Fottrell, Quentin. “People Spend Most of Their Waking Hours Staring at Screens.” MarketWatch, 4 Aug. 2018, www.marketwatch.com/story/people-are-spending-most-of-their-waking-hours-staring-at-screens-2018-08-01.

 

“Mental Illness.” National Institute of Mental Health, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Feb. 2019, www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/mental-illness.shtml.

 

Petersen, Andrea. “College Students Flood Mental-Health Centers.” Wall Street Journal, 2016, p. D.1.

 

Savege Scharff, Jill. Psychoanalysis Online: Mental Health, Teletherapy, and Training. Routledge, 2018.

 

U.S. Population with a Social Media Profile 2019.” Statista, 2019, www.statista.com/statistics/273476/percentage-of-us-population-with-a-social-network-profile/.

 

Yubo Hou, et al. “Social Media Addiction: Its Impact, Mediation, and Intervention.” Cyberpsychology, vol. 13, no. 1, Mar. 2019, pp. 1–17. EBSCOhost, doi:10.5817/CP2019-1-4.

As people grow closer to social media, social media breaks our mental health and our self-awareness. People live in a time were the number of likes, the number of followers, the number of retweets, the number on the scale, the letter on your chest, the number of plates, and the number in the bank, define who you are and either make or break you. I have chosen to talk about the show “13 Reasons Why” and the song “Here (2:00 AM Version)” by Alessia Cara. In the show “13 Reasons Why” you watch the show in two perspectives, Hannah Bakers and Clay Jensen’s. Hannah was an ordinary teenager until one day she couldn’t handle the pain she was dealing with and ended her life. You learn of what had happened through the thirteen tapes she leaves for the people that hurt her the most. In the song “Here (2:00 AM Version)” by Alessia Cara, we hear a girl singing about her experience at a college party. In the background we here a slow melody, piano like, and we start to get a sense of how the song will go. She sings in a soft sweet voice and tells us how she spent her time feeling alone and uncomfortable at this party she was dragged too. In both the show and the song, we see connections to social media and the influences it is having on our everyday lives. Between, being forced to go to a party where you don’t know a single person or being treated like a piece of garbage for being different, they have allowed social media platforms to change our lives and control them in the worst possible way. Through the show and the song, you can see how the common theme of people not caring and social statuss play the biggest roles in the end. Two girls with different stories, live through the same struggles in their lives.

In “13 Reasons Why,” you see the life of Hannah Baker through the tapes she left after she had killed herself. In every tape you learn something new about her life and what had led her to make the decision of taking her own life. In the first episode, “Tape one, Side one”, you see she had just transferred to a new high school and knew very few people. One of the first people she had met was Justin Foley. They began talking, texting and talking on the phone, and ended up going on there first date. As you watch the episode it gets darker, you see how the sunsets and night time starts and you see how your screen changes from bright and detailed to almost monotone and simple. They are running around the park enjoying each other. Swinging high, running through the jungle gym, sliding down the metal slide. We listen to Hannahs voice recording as she explains the situation to us. She says how she dreamed her first kiss with Justin was in the park, and how he made her feel like a child again. They were having a great time and Hannahs dream had come to life. Justin Foley kissed Hannah Baker, as she slid down the slide and caught her before she fell off. Before this infamous kiss had happened, Justin took several pictures of Hannah as she was coming down the slide. A beautiful girl in a short skirt enjoying her time, doesn’t realize that this one picture is going to ruin the rest of her high school year. The next morning Justin showed this picture to all of his friends and his best friend Bryce Walker had took the picture and sent it to the whole school. As they all arrive in their first class, the picture is being shown around and everyone is starring at Hannah. You see how a picture that was taken of Hannah was sent around and she was shammed as the school slut. As the recording of Hannahs voice comes back she explains how upset she was but understands that he didn’t mean to let her down. You see a series of events go down in the first episode and we see the start of Hannah’s depression. You see how one picture had created this negative image of a girl who had done nothing wrong but fall in love. You see how with just one social platform the self-esteem of an innocent girl was thorn into pieces. You see the pain that Hannah felt as her body was exposed to the public. Just one incident created so much pain in her life that everything else just took her down even further. Later you see how her personal poem gets spread around because a boy thought it was normal to steal her work.  She had finally opened up to a group of people, in a writing club, who understood her and a boy who seemed to get her. This boy, who acted as if he was Hannahs best friend, had decided her poem about her naked body being exposed in reference to the Justin Foley situation, was published in the school media newspaper.  This boy had come to Hannahs house and was reading her poems. They sat on the floor, backs against the bed, giggling and enjoying their time as they read old poems. Then Hannah goes to the bathroom, and this boy goes through her notebook and looks for the juiciest poem there is. He finds something but we can’t yet see what it is. He rips it out and places it in his pocket. The next day this poem is already in the school paper and the English teachers are reading it aloud and the students are giggling about it. All the fingers point to Hannah and yet again she is the center of attention. You begin to see how reputation matters more than the truth and the people in the show only care about themselves. You see how Hannah allowed others people’s opinions control her life, and she came to a point where she could not function without someone else’s opinion. They created a life for her were someone she had to take her own life because the pressure, and the rumors, and the gossip, and the social standards were just impossible to bear with. In this show you see how people are taking over our lives, and it ruins them. It ruins the relationships with people, the lives of others every single day, and ruins the relationship with our selves. You see how they allow social platforms to spread gossip and control how they act because god forbid some doesn’t like you on social media.

 

In the song “Here,” we see a girl at a party, chips in the air, alcohol being spilled everywhere, people playing cards, and people throwing up. Everything is completely frozen as she walks around the house talking about the situation going on. The music is slow, a piano playing in the background, chords are strong the most dominant part, and her voice is shaky, and you hear the pain she feels. She sings the lyrics, “But since my friends are here, I just came to kick it, but really I would rather be at home all by myself not in this room, with people who don’t even care about my wellbeing.” She talks about having to go to a party with her friends, that have left her all alone around people who only care for her on social media. She also states, “Excuse me if I seem a little unimpressed with this, an anti-social pessimist but usually I don’t mess with this.” She expresses how everyone at this party is sitting on their phones looking through social media and is just talking about each other. There is no real conversation or real connection they are just sitting and trash talking their so-called friends. Then, a line comes that brings out the true meaning of what is happening at this party, “Not there in the kitchen with the girl, who’s always gossiping about her friends… Right next to the boy who’s throwing up ’cause, he can’t take what’s in his cup no more.” She realizes that no cares for each other, everyone just wants to look better than the other person on social media and she rather spend time with someone who’s throwing up because he wanted to look cool in front of his friends. The whole song talks about the unfortunate situation of social media taking over our lives, how a girl who has so many friends can feel so alone even though she is in a room full of people. How social media becomes more important than the people around you. How someone feels the need to get so drunk they are throwing up and everyone is recording it instead of helping. While listening to the song you hear a part where all the music stops and the only thing you can focus on is her voice. A part that is so crucial to the whole song. The part that clearly shows how she feels. She sings, “I’m standoffish, don’t want what you’re offering, and I’m done talking, awfully sad it had to be that way, so tell my people when they’re ready that I’m ready, and I’m standing by the TV with my beanie low.” She sings with her voice cracking as she sings in pain, how the people she came with had left her. How she rather be alone then with a bunch of people that only see her through her social media. How she had to go home alone because she was in so much pain that she felt like an outcast at a party. We see how within just twenty minutes at a party her whole life was thrown around. The amount of social media presented made her so uncomfortable that she had to go home. People spent so much time on social media that it became their reality. They cared for you only if you were posting what they liked and you had a good following. It came to the point where what they posted online had to become what they did in person. People talked about you behind your back and acted like they love you on social media.

People are allowing this thing called social media, this thing called social standards, this thing called popularity, ruin their lives. It takes over and makes them hate themselves. You aren’t pretty enough, you don’t have enough money, you don’t have enough likes, you don’t have enough gains, you don’t have enough shoes or bags or clothes. You don’t look like that model or the fitness guy you love, you are human, all perfect and all different. In “13 Reasons Why,” we see a girl who got bullied to a point where she had to take her own life. Someone took a picture of a girl in her underwear and spread it around the whole school. Someone took a personal poem and published it for everyone to see. In the song “Here,” we see a girl at a party regretting ever going there. A girl who wished that everyone spent some time talking to each other instead of gossiping about social media. A girl who wishes that the boys didn’t get so drunk to make their friends happy. A girl who wished her friends didn’t leave her alone in a situation that made her feel uncomfortable. In both stories we see a girl that is getting no support from her friends. She is left alone, she is treated as if she doesn’t matter, and is disregarded as a human. Will it take a million uncomfortable women, a million boys on drugs, a million suicides, or an infinite number of unhappy people, before we realize that social media and these crazy standards are slowly killing us. We are at the age where what is on Instagram matters more than who we really are. What other people think of you defines who you are and how you act. We are the problem and we cannot even see it. We create these situations where we make our lives so much harder. We stay friends we the people who only care how many followers we have and how many people we have hooked up with.

Task One: Support each claim you make with concrete, clear evidence.

For this task I used your comments and went through each claim after a quote or research-based statement. I tried to reword each follow up sentence so it didn’t steer away from the actual quote. I made it flow and only include the most important and necessary details that were connected to the quote.

Task Two: Organize the paper around a central claim that is not overgeneralized but gleaned directly from research findings and an attempt to answer the research question clearly.

For this task I also used your comments and tried to fix all the spots where you mentioned it was to personal or to vague. I fixed these spots by adding a piece of information that would connect it to my running theme of social media and mental health. I also moved around certain sentences that fit better after a quote to make my statement and understanding of the quote to be part of the theme instead of just extra information.

Task Three: Develop a more professional voice that uses nuance and specificity with its audience.

For this task I tried to look at the paper as if it was not my own. I read each sentence as if it was its own and then read it as a whole in the paragraph. I changed key words to change them from personal or formal. I tried to make the statements generalizations instead of claims. Then I went back and made sure each sentence was part of a whole, that each one followed the one before and it flowed with a constant voice.

 

After going through all of my revision tasks and rereading my essay multiple times I had noticed that some parts felt as if it was more personal then research based. After realizing this and finding a common theme it was clear to me that if I change this the essay would flow better and a common theme would come out. Developing a more professional voice was harder than the other two tasks because this is topic is close to heart and something that I wrote about in Eng 2100. It took multiple times of rereading and trying to fully disconnect from the topic and only look at it in an editing sense.

Task One: Replace overgeneralization with nuanced, supported claims and points. Leave room for disagreement. Identify trends instead of describing what “all people” do. Focus on talking about what the text suggests, instead of how life works.

            For this task I first reread my paper and look for where I fix overgeneralizations. I started by changing the word we to the word you or people and adding information that was more text specific and cutting out anything that was suggestive. I changed the last paragraph about 13 Reasons why to relate only to the show and removed everything that was mentioned of the outside world. I also changed the last paragraph of the essay, to a more open-ended statement then making claims. Changing the words, we and our, to, peoples, you, and theirs.

Task Two: Add clear, analysis-oriented specificity. Use examples to support clear points. Break down the composition of key moments and details of your artifacts.

For this task I began to look where I can add more specific details. I first added details to Hannahs and Justin relationship and story plot. I added details about what was going on while they were hanging out, and how the mood of the screen shifted back and forth between her memory through the recording, and when the event actually took place. Then I added details about her situation with the boy and the poem. I added how they interacted with each other, how he stole her poem, and how the school found out about this poem.

Task Three: Develop a thesis that is about the artifacts. You can draw a connection between them—what they both suggest or comment on—and then (this is more optional for a thesis statement to work in this assignment) make a split—how they differ. Spill the beans from the very start of the paper. “They are similar but different” does not a thesis make: Say how, specifically.

For this task I added details that connected the show and the movie to each other. Instead of keeping them as two separate pieces, I forged them into one with different plots. Adding details how they relate to each other and how they are truly talking about one theme using different events.

Through my revision process I had realized I was caught between not adding enough information or adding information that was known to me from my previous essay. I reread my essay and tried to find every point where I was adding my personal opinion instead of what was actually going on in the show and in the song. I went sentence by sentence to find each point. I started with changing certain words and rephrasing parts to connect them to the plots and artifacts. Then I went back and started adding details about individual events that called for better descriptions and key moments. Finally, I made the connection between both artifacts to create a common theme instead of just having two separate ideas. I added these connections into the very beginning and then the very end.

For our group topic we chose Health and Care. As we grow closer to social media, social media breaks our mental health and our self-awareness. We live in a time were the number of likes, the number of followers, the number of retweets, the number on the scale, the letter on your chest, the number of plates, and the number in the bank, define who you are and either make or break you. For this topic, I have chosen to talk about the show “13 Reasons Why” and the poem “Social Media is a Lie.” In “13 Reasons Why,” we see the life of Hannah Baker through the tapes she left after she had killed herself. In every tape we learn something new about her life and what had led her to make the decision of taking her own life. We see how a picture that was taken was sent around and shammed her as a slut. Her first boyfriend in her brand-new school had taken her out on a cute date in the park which ended in a terribly provocative photo which he decided to show to his friends. As we end up seeing due to mass texting the picture was sent around the school shamming her as the school whore. We see how her personal poem gets spread around because I boy thought it was cool.  She had finally opened up to a group of people who understood her and a boy who seemed to get her. But we see how she couldn’t trust him either because he stole her poem and published it in his newspaper which shammed her as the freaky slut of the school. We see how a boy raped three girls and doesn’t get in trouble because he plays two sports ad his parents are filthy rich. This boy was the richest of the richest and had held a pool party, and because he had past relations with Hannah he didn’t think much of why she had come. She was in the hot tub with him with no other intentions than relaxing, but he had thought other wise. He raped her just like he did three other girls and everyone praised him for it because he was the man of party’s drugs and sex. We see how reputation matters more than the truth and ruins the lives on two mourning parents. Hannah was in love and so was her amazing boyfriend but when it came to the time of telling the world he was too scared to tell everyone he was dating the school slut and crazy girl who cannot take this society’s compliments of her ass. We allow others people’s opinions control our lives, and we come to a point where we cannot function without someone else’s opinion. We created a life were someone takes their life because the pressure, and the rumors, and the gossip, and the social standards are just impossible to bear with. In this show we see how people are taking over our lives, and it ruins us. It ruins our relationships with people, our lives every single day, and ruins our relationship with our selves. In the poem “Social Media is a Lie,” thelemonpolice talks about the reality of social media. This person talks about how when we see one thing on social media, we do not know what is actually happening. How people spend their time sitting on social media instead of talking to the people around you. We go on dates and dinners with our friends but we canot recall one sentence the person sitting in front of you said. We do though remember what miss perfect life posted about her new car and bag. How people post the gifts they receive but don’t show how hurt they feel and how much they wished they can tell the world. We get this and that and make the world believe that we love our lives but we cannot come to the fact that we are living in misery because even our friends don’t know why cry ourselves to sleep at night. How we are forcing ourselves to smile for the camera but are actually dying inside. How we have to take a million pictures to find the right one to get the greatest number of likes. Why is it ok that a beautiful girl must turn herself inside out and take four hundred pictures before she can post the best one that fits this society’s rules and regulations.  How we need our friend’s approval to make us feel worthy but those friends are just using you for something in the long run. Weve been friends with the same people for ages and at one point we realize that when you cannot give they could care less about you. We never will say something because you believe without them you are nothing, but they are not worth your tears or the stress you deal with when you cannot please them. How we post that family photo or wedding photo but do not tell the world how miserable these people are. We live between fights, and cheating, and abuse, but cannot get ourselves to come forward and tell the truth and get help because the truth is bland and pointless. We are allowing this thing called social media, this thing called social standards, this thing called popularity, ruin our lives. It takes over and makes us hate ourselves. We aren’t pretty enough, don’t have enough money, don’t have enough likes, don’t have enough gains, don’t have enough shoes or bags or clothes. We don’t look like that model or the fitness guy you love, we are humans each perfect and each different. Will it take a million abused women, a million boys on steroids, a million suicides, or an infinite number of unhappy people, before we realize that social media and these crazy standards are slowly killing us. We are at the age where what is on Instagram matters more then who we really are. What other people think of you defines who you are and how you act. We are the problem and we cannot even see it.