Plugging Back in
Plant at the Lauritzen Gardens.
In the 5th grade, I got my first cell phone. Saying that back makes me wonder how my parents at the time thought that was a good idea. At the ripe age of 12, I had the world at my fingertips, and I didn’t even realize it. My parents were smart enough however to delay my access to social media until high school. While all my peers were beginning to communicate on Snapchat, share their lives on Instagram and enjoy entertainment on Musical.ly (which would later come to be known as Tik Tok), I was figuring out the magic world of emojis. My relationship with social media in the short seven years I’ve had it has been tumultuous. Nothing monumental ever happened and I believe that’s where my issues began. In the past, I’ve seen social media as purely pleasurable, and entertainment based. I believe now that social media is the greatest tool I have as a journalist to truly connect with people. Unfortunately, this realization has led me to my current relationship with social media. Right now, this looks like no Instagram app tempting me on the home screen, no Facebook app to scroll through the feeds of elementary school friends and no Tik Tok to aimlessly scroll through 60, 1-minute interval videos to look up from the blue light and find another wasted hour. The truth is that through bettering my relationship with social media by distancing myself I have been able to learn to appreciate it in a different light. When I do dive head first back into the thick content sludge of today’s social media, I hope I’ll be able to better navigate it. I’ll know that I’m using it to connect with only the people that see through to my message, one of journalistic ethics, news-based interests and learning. Similar to all things culturally human, social media has evolved. Instagram used to be a place for pictures from close friends you follow and now it has transformed (take a look at this article to see how to help change that) to resemble the most popular platform Tik Tok. Adapting to new updates so quickly can take a toll on how you interact with the apps but when I do go back, I’ll be in control of what I want to see. After all, that is what I was craving when I deleted so much of my social media; a sense of control. I wanted to be able to control how addicted I was to checking how many likes my post received, which accounts I subscribed to and most importantly, the real world outside of my personal black box. Disconnecting to some degree has allowed me to prepare to plug back in, the hard reset of my physical body left me recharged to re-introduce my digital presence.