By Blake Downs, Editor-in-Chief
It happens almost every day in one of my classes: I tell a student to put their phone away only for it to pop out once again mere minutes later as if they cannot help but be on it. Many times, it seems as if they have an involuntary scratch that they have to itch or an addiction they cannot withstand.
Along with this, as a teacher, I am noticing a continuing trend of helplessness when it comes to students completing their own work. Every question cannot be answered, it seems, unless I provide the solution, even down to the word.
I blame TikTok and other social media.
In the English classes I teach, students read an essay by former U.S. senator Ben Sasse in which he discusses the importance of teenagers obtaining summer jobs. In it, he also points out that as a university president, he realized that life has become too easy for students as many chores are done either by machines or by the people their parents can afford to pay to do it for them. Because of that, students no longer are as active as they used to be and now fill their spare time with media and entertainment.
I see this in my own life as well. I am definitely not as creative as I used to be, especially since purchasing a smartphone and television (I grew up without the latter). I often bemoan the loss of finding inspiration and creativity in everyday life without the distractions of flashing screens and moving pixels. There is a constant sense that I am being pulled around by media and obtrusive diversions, all the while wasting precious time I could be using to create and develop.
If I feel this way, I can only imagine the greater struggle my students face as they grow up in a fully digitally immersed world.
Granted, there are plenty of benefits to our modern digital age, including the useful tools that the internet and social media provide. My students have more at their fingertips than I ever thought possible in my high school years. The ability to be socially connected with virtually anyone and tell important stories is easier than ever. However, despite this, our students have suffered from the proliferation of social media.
Thanks to it, many in our society do not know how to think for themselves. We are inundated with so much media and can quickly look up something that we have lost the patience and mental fortitude that critical thinking requires. By all measures, our attention capacity has collectively decreased: Even by the most liberal estimates, the average human attention span while using a screen is 47 seconds, down from about two and a half minutes in 2004. (Even as I write this, I am finding it hard to concentrate and not look at my phone.)
Because of this reliance on media, we are often told what to think instead of how to think. We have access to tools like Google that help us find information, even if that information is biased. We watch merely seconds-long videos on TikTok, YouTube or Instagram that present us with a shallow understanding of a subject or issue.
TikTok may be the ultimate worst example of this. As it was created to keep users fully engaged by presenting videos and content that individual consumers want to see, it instills in the viewer a dopamine drip that quite literally creates an addiction, according to psychologists. The endless interaction with desired content keeps the users stuck in a loop of media consumption, and, ultimately, they cannot help but be negatively affected by this.
This constant media intake leads to what many media researchers call cultivation, in which views and perspectives of the consumer change over time due to the messaging and framing, whether intentional or not, of a particular medium. Thus, attitudes of a society can be changed en masse due to apps like TikTok: Aggression and violence witnessed on social media will cause those who view it to see the world as a violent place and become aggressive themselves.
This intrusion by media into our everyday lives has left us even more divided as a society. The more we rely on content that has been curated individually for us by the all-powerful algorithm, the more we fall into our proverbial echo chambers that only regurgitate our version of the world without any sense of outside commentary that may question it.
With this continuing regression into the darkest caverns of our own ideological tribes, it is no wonder that we are the most polarized politically that we have been in decades; this wide divide causes us to view those who disagree with us as inhuman. In the classroom, I continually see a rise in social disengagement and an aggressive mentality that causes students to lash out at others in a misguided sense of self-protection before they can be hurt themselves.
The solution to the negative outcomes of widespread social media usage isn’t going to be a simple one. Banning TikTok may indeed help raise student attention spans, but the individualistic and tribal nature of the remaining social media will still cause the decay of a sense of community and responsibility to others.
It must really start with the parents and adults who are not only the gatekeepers and guardians of what comes into their homes but, in the best sense, are also examples of how functioning adults can be civilized while interacting and debating graciously–all while providing a safe space for children to grow.
Without some sort of course correction, our students face a world of savagery and retribution that has, up until this point, been regulated only to apocalyptic literature and film.
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