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.