Why Do People Care?
Instagram used to be an app where people could post whatever without worrying about what their followers thought of it. As our generation specifically grew up, we started closely monitoring how many likes each of our pictures got and even started comparing to their friends' pictures as a sort of competition to see who was more "popular". The magic number is eleven. That is until Instagram removed the number of likes visible except to the poster. People go as far as to even delete posts that didn't get the desired number of likes. It's me. I'm "people". Well used to be. The obsession over likes and views is corrupting the youth at large.
Why Does This Matter?
Jason Howie |
What Else?
TikTok. Oh how I love TikTok. I spend hours upon hours on this addicting app without even realizing it to only check the time and think, "Ah shit, I have a blog post due tonight". Kidding kidding. But really though, TikTok started as an app called Musical.ly. This app was mainly used by younger kids to make weird dance and lip syncing videos. Eventually the app was acquired by Chinese company ByteDance in November of 2017. I think I can speak for most "older" users when I say we downloaded it as a joke and became addicted. How is this app bad you ask? First off, there are no parental restrictions (that I know of) so kids as young as six years old are exposed to adult humor. Honestly, most of the videos I see on the "ForYou page" are very dirty and not something six year olds should be seeing; not like they understand it anyways, but still. Second, the bigger users only care about how many views or likes their videos are getting. Most of the time the views are only shown to the user but the likes on the video are visible to everyone who sees the video. Our own fellow classmate, Aric Vasquez, went viral on one of his videos with 300,000+ views and 10,000+ likes. He went around asking our friends to go like his video so it could boost his number of likes. Another example of no parental controls, yet a hilarious one, is on Facebook. A little girl tells her Amazon Alexa to play "Little Bo Peep Has Lost Her Sheep" but instead gets a song by Lil Dickie... not exactly something a three year old should be exposed to or listening to at her age. Last but not least, another Amazon Alexa incident where a little boy asks for a song called "Digger Digger" but is given a porn station in return. Both videos are pretty funny but still show that modern technology and social media is not giving/setting good examples for the youth.
Even though social media isn't really "healthy" per-say for people, it's still addicting and people will never really follow through with their "social media cleanse". Admit it, we all love it too much.
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